XVII. LIBERALS USE THE AMERICAN COURTS TO SILENCE AMERICAN
ANTI-COMMUNISTS

XVIII. THE ORDER ENTRENCHES ITSELF FOR THE COLD WAR

XIX. THE MILITARY INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY AND KNIGHTS OF THE SOSJ
DEFEND AGAINST COMMUNISM

XX. THE POST-WAR GERMAN ORDER OF ST. JOHN ABANDONS THE SOSJTO
IMPROVE ITS IMAGE

XXI. THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA STAND AGAINST HUMANISTS WITHIN THE
CHURCH

XXII. THE HISTORIC MISSION OF THE SOSJ

INTRODUCTION

Founded near Our Lord’s Holy Sepulcher c. 1050, the
Brothers of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem is one of the
oldest orders of the Catholic Church. Named after St. John the
Baptist, a brotherhood was begun to provide a hospice for pilgrims
travelling to Jerusalem and it was elevated to a monastic order in
1098. By that time it had developed into a military brotherhood
known widely as the Knights Hospitaller. The Brethren managed
their Hospital and enlarged their service to ensure the safety
of the pilgrimage routes to the Holy Land. The King of Jerusalem
confirmed the Hospitallers as an international corporation in 1104.
The Apostolic See became its perpetual Protector in 1113 by a Papal
Bull of Paschal II. Renowned for skilled hospital care and prowess
in battle, the Hospitaller Knights became indispensable defenders of
Christendom and the Order was first recognized as a sovereign state
by King Richard the Lion Heart of England in 1191. The Order was
forced by the Moslems from the Holy Land in 1291 and from Rhodes in
1523.

The Convent of the Order was on the island of
Malta, and its 70th Grand Master was Prince Ferdinand von Hompesch,
when the humanist revolution was creating widespread change on the
political map of Europe. The Knights of the Order used strategic
foresight in gaining the Czar of Russia as a secondary Protector
because in 1798 Malta was seized by General Napoleon Bonaparte. This
was the Order’s first confrontation with Freemasonry and with its
spawn of democratic revolutions. A large contingent of French
Knights of Malta, who had accepted the precepts of the
revolutionaries, joined Napoleon’s army. Most of the remainder
rallied to St. Petersburg, Russia, which was the home of their new
powerful Protector.

There have been many questions concerning the
legal and historical validity of the SOSJ after its transfer from
Malta to Russia, and later to the United States of America. This
essay addresses various aspects of the continuity of the Order’s
government starting from the late 18th century in St. Petersburg,
following it to the United States of America in the beginning of the
20th century and finally devolving upon the Knights of Justice who
now are headquartered in Florida and Tennessee. The Knights
compromised their strict Roman Catholic principles as they focused
on the survival and independence of their brotherhood, but they
succeeded in preserving their lineage intact. Other provincial
groups of Knights of Malta eventually became sufficiently organized
to warrant their respective national monarchs to recognize them as
distinct orders later in the 19th century. This is the cause of the
several widely recognized orders of St. John and of Malta that we
know today. The Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem is, in
contrast, the factual continuation of the Order from Malta, and was
supported as such by the Russian monarchy continuously until the
death of Czar Kirill I in 1938. Since then it has continued without
a host monarch designated as its formal Protector. Rather, since the
Order became extra-territorial, it reverted to the tradition of
election of its own sovereign prince from amongst its Knights of
Justice, an historic right which has been retained since 1191.

The Coronation of Czar Nicholas
II

II. THE SOSJ PRESERVES ITSELF BY DEFENDING
MONARCHY

Shortly after their arrival in Russia, the exiled
Knights of Malta joined with the Catholic Grand Priory of Russia and
elected their Orthodox and married Protector, Czar Paul I, as the
71st Grand Master. Grand Master Czar Paul I helped to settle the
SOSJ in the Russian capital city. He decreed that their Convent
would remain at the Imperial residence of St. Petersburg, and that
his successors would continue as its protectors. He created a second
Grand Priory principally for his Orthodox nobility. He then invited
non-Catholic Europeans, mainly Lutherans, to join this new priory
for the purpose of preserving the SOSJ and the Christian monarchies
of Europe by perpetual opposition to the Humanist Revolution. His
plan to return the Russian Orthodox Church, of which he was the
sovereign head, to full communion with the Catholic Church had
created enemies among his closest advisors and relatives. Czar Paul
I, an unrecognized champion of the Order, was martyred, allegedly by
Freemasons, in 1801.

An image of the OSJ Priory
Palace within the Imperial Residence at Gatchina, Russia. The Relics
of the Order were saved from this building by the White Russians in
1919, after the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Holy See had often desired in the past to
control the election of the Grand Master and the Order’s history
shows that the knights always successfully resisted this
interference. The election of Czar Paul I had broken the lineage of unmarried Catholic grand masters,
but continued the jealously guarded tradition of independent
election of their leader by the knights. The Knights of Malta
believed that the unusual circumstances in world affairs which
resulted in the relocation of the convent to Russia called for
nontraditional action to salvage the Order and to counter the
Revolution. Election disputes developed after the death of Grand
Master Czar Paul I and this helped to create a permanent split
between the Sovereign Order in Russia and the surviving Italian
priories of knights.

The Sovereign Council in Russia and Czar
Alexander I asked the Pope to name the next Grand Master “for one
time only” from a list of candidates presented from the various
priories of knights. The Pope selected the Russian Catholic Grand
Priory’s candidate, who became the 72nd Grand Master, John Baptist
di Tommasi. Tommasi died in 1805, and then the Pope tried to name
Tommasi’s successor. This intervention was not acceptable to the
Sovereign Council and to the majority of the Knights of St. John who
were determined to elect their own leader as was the tradition and
historic right of the Order. It was also generally known that
Napoleon was directing the Pope’s choice for Grand Master. The SOSJ
chose the Russian Czar as the head and Protector of the Order which
was being managed by the Sovereign Council. They refused to
recognize the papal appointments which followed thereafter, for they
were not legitimately initiated by the Order. Early in the 19th
century, the Italian priories adopted the name Sovereign Military
Order of Malta. The members of the fledgling SMOM declared
themselves the legitimate continuation of the Order and refused to
recognize the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. The
knights of the SOSJ reciprocated by not recognizing the splinter
group in Italy. The disagreement continues today. Indeed, it has
only been in the past few years that the SMOM has grudgingly
accepted Czar Paul I, but as the 72nd Grand Master of the Order.
They continue to describe him as Grand Master “in fact” but not “in
justice” because the Czar was a married Orthodox Christian.

Nevertheless, the Order became an influential
institution in Imperial Russia deeply involved with the preservation
of the European monarchies in general, and with the Romanoff dynasty
in particular. The two grand priories in Russia, one Catholic and
the other principally Orthodox, educated young men at their school,
the Corps des Pages, in St. Petersburg. The Corps des Pages was the
academy for the creation of new Knights of Malta. The graduates of
this school became leaders of the exclusive Guard Divisions and
thereby protectors of the Imperial Family of Russia. Their tradition of health care was continued
through the hospital and relief agency known as the Russian White
Cross. The Sovereign Council, consisting of senior Knights of
Justice, governed the Order and ensured its legal continuation.
Initially the Order was led by Lieutenant Grand Master General
Soltikoff after the death of Czar Paul I. Eventually the leadership
of the SOSJ consisted of a President of the Sovereign Council who
was assisted by a Grand Chancellor. These men reported directly to
each reigning Russian czar who was described as the “Head of the
Chapter.” Each Czarina was likewise traditionally the honorary head
of the White Cross. The czars took personal custody of the Order’s
famous icon of Our Lady of Philermos and the two relics which are
the hand of St. John the Baptist and a piece of the True Cross.
These were kept either at the Winter Palace or at the SOSJ Priory
Chapel of the Gatchina Palace, depending upon the liturgical
calendar. This arrangement continued until the Bolshevik Revolution
of October 1917.

Prince
Grand Master

Lt.
Grand Master

President of the Sovereign
Council

Grand
Prior

Grand
Chancellor

Protector

1797

Prince GM Ferdinand von Hompesch

Pope Pius VI

Czar Paul I

1798

GM Czar Paul I

LGM J Count de Litta

Prince de Conde

GM Czar Paul I

1799

GM Czar Paul I

LGM Field Marshall Count Soltykoff

Prince de Conde

GM Czar Paul I

1801

LGM Field Marshall Count Soltykoff

Undetermined

Czar Alexander I

Czar Alexander I

1803

GM John Baptist di Tommasi

Undetermined

Czar Alexander

Czar Alexander I

1805

Undetermined

Czar Alexander

Czar Alexander I

1825

Undetermined

Senior Grand Duke

Czar Nicholas I

1855

Undetermined

Senior Grand Duke

Czar Alexander II

1881

Undetermined

Senior Grand Duke

Czar Alexander III

1894

Undetermined

G D Vladimir

Czar Nicholas II

III. THE INTERNATIONAL WHITE CROSS OF THE SOSJ

In 1893 the Russian Ambassador to the United
States, Prince Cantacuzene, Russian Admiral Grand Duke Alexander
Michaelovich and Russian Transportation Commissioner Colonel A.
Cherep Spiridovich, introduced the Russian SOSJ White Cross at the
Chicago World’s Fair to American civic leaders. Pope Leo XIII
promised prominent civic leader Mrs. Potter Palmer of Chicago his
support for her chairmanship of “Women of the World” presentations
at the Fair and assigned Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul,
Minnesota to work with her. Thereby began the SOSJ affiliation with
an American White Cross movement supported by the Catholic Church.
The American Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop Ireland continued their
affiliation with the White Cross and the Knights of St. John for at
least twenty years thereafter. Archbishop Ireland was the head
chaplain for the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic and
therefore had a responsibility for the welfare of American
servicemen. Their initial efforts resulted in a White Cross
headquarters in Portland, Oregon which coordinated American nurses
sent to Cuba and the Philippine Islands during the Spanish-American
War.

The next public result of this
Russian-American-Catholic coordination was an attempt in 1899 to get
a Title 36 Charter from the U.S. Congress for the National White
Cross of America. General Nelson Miles, commanding General of the
U.S. Army, and George Westinghouse, founder of Westinghouse Electric
of Pittsburgh, were among those involved directly in the White Cross
charter effort. The proposed charter would have allowed the
organization to continue hospital and relief work exclusively for
the American military community. The charter bill was passed to the
foreign affairs desk and stalled indefinitely by those concerned
about Russian and Catholic influence in the organization. While it
had been passed through both the House and Senate without
dissension, it was ultimately not signed into law by the President
of the United States. After all, the White Cross was a Russian
institution of the SOSJ, and Roman Catholic Archbishop John Ireland
would be one of the founding members of the proposed American
affiliate. Though the American White Cross proposed exclusive
support for the American military community, the obvious competition
with the American Red Cross which did similar work also concerned
some politicians. Archbishop Ireland, Chief Chaplain for the Grand
Army of the Republic, General Miles, George Westinghouse of
Pittsburgh, Chicago industrialist Richard Teller Crane, Chicago real
estate mogul Potter Palmer, and many others continued life long
affiliations with Russia or with the Russian-American White Cross
movement.

Several things occurred in 1901 which would
have long term effects on the SOSJ. Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich,
son of the Russian OSJ Grand Prior, assisted Richard Teller Crane of
Chicago with plans to organize the American White Cross in New York
City. It is believed that they created the American International
Academy and named explorer and geologist Francis C. Nicholas as its
first president. This pan-American organization was designed for
intelligence gathering operations. In 1901, the SMOM (Sovereign
Military Order of Malta headquartered in Rome) and Cardinal Gibbons
announced that an American Grand Priory would be started solely for
the American Catholic members of a fraternal organization called the
“Knights of St. John” which had been started about 1880 in imitation
of the old order. Colonel Cherep Spiridovich, mentioned previously,
became President of the Slavonic Society of Moscow. For five years,
he had been Serbian Consul to Moscow, and was a member of the
Serbian and later of the Russian Secret Services. The Slavonic
Society was an intelligence operation which funneled arms and
resources to nationalist elements in the Balkans. The patron of the
Society was Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. His wife, Grand Duchess
Ella, was the elder sister of the Russian Czarina.

In 1903 the American Red Cross administrators
restructured their organization and curtailed the authority of their
founder, Clara Barton. Barton had been influenced in her famous work
by the Russian White Cross and by the Johanniter Orden relief
services in Europe. Her friend, Princess Louise of Baden, was the
daughter of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, Herrenmeister of the
Johanniter Orden. The American Red Cross Field Service
Superintendent was Edward Howe from the English St. John’s Ambulance
Association. Barton resigned from the American Red Cross and
established the National First Aid Association of America in the
District of Columbia in 1904. She was assisted in this by men who
had tried to start the American White Cross, namely General Nelson
A. Miles and Field Superintendent Edward Howe.

In 1904, R. T. Crane, U.S. Consul for Persia, built
an emergency hospital clinic in Chicago in memory of a niece killed
in a disastrous inner city fire. Mrs. Palmer sent funds from Chicago
to the Russian Czarina, Patroness of the Russian White Cross, to be
used for relief of victims of the Russo-Japanese War. St. Andrew’s
Ambulance Society of Scotland received its new name and independence
from the St. John’s Ambulance Association of England.

In December, 1904 the American White Cross
First Aid Society was started in Chicago by civic leader Mrs. Potter
Palmer, Roman Catholic Cardinal Gibbons, the industrialist Andrew
Carnegie, representatives of the U.S. Army and Edward Howe, formerly
the American Red Cross Field Superintendent. Edward Howe was thus
the field superintendant for both the National First Aid Association
and for the American White Cross First Aid Society. A similar
arrangement existed in England between the Venerable Order of St.
John of Jerusalem and the British Red Cross. The Catholic Church,
American civic leaders, the U.S. Army and the English St. John’s
Ambulance Association were thus working together with the Russian
White Cross. This was the “ecumenical beginning” of the Order in
America, which Grand Chancellor Pichel described in his history of
the SOSJ in 1958. The American White Cross First Aid Society had
Mrs. Potter Palmer, Mrs. H. McCormick, Andrew Carnegie, R. T. Crane,
General J. D. Irwin and Cardinal Gibbons as Vice Presidents. By
association, this brought the Crane Family, the Cantacuzene Family,
the McCormick Family, Nicholas Murray Butler, the American military
medical community, and the Catholic Church into the White Cross
ambulance work which soon followed.

Besides Edward Howe, the moving force in the White
Cross was the famous Chicago surgeon and Illinois militia officer
Dr. Nicholas Senn. Dr. Senn had been President of the American
Medical Association and a founder of the Association of U. S.
Military Surgeons. He had also been involved with the early
organizing activities of the White Cross. He was associated with the
Knights in Russia and had visited them in St. Petersburg in 1902. He
was instrumental in the organization of the program in New York.
Unfortunately he died prematurely in 1908.

After the death of Dr. Senn, the American Red Cross
was assured of the lead in national relief work, and in 1910,
reinstated their “First Aid to the Injured” program. The American
White Cross therefore eventually focused on large-scale relief
overseas during war and famine. As we will later see, a 1921 relief
association of American Catholics from the White Cross evolved into
a new American Association of the SMOM in 1927.

The Chicago Crane family affiliation with the
White Cross eventually led, in 1941, to their daughter Frances’
marriage to OSJ Hereditary Knight Commander Belosselsky-Belozersky,
in New York City. The White Cross work of the Chicago Palmers was
continued by their relatives, the Cantacuzenes. Prince Michel
Cantacuzene and Julia Grant Cantacuzene were members of the Romanian
Prince Cantacuzene and President General Ulysses S. Grant families.
An early and prominent member of the American White Cross was Wall
Street lawyer William Nelson Cromwell, who was responsible for the
success of, among many other projects, McCormick Harvester,
Carnegie’s U.S. Steel Corporation and the Panama Canal. He became
Grand Prior of the American SOSJ in 1912. Charles R. Crane, son of
R. T. Crane, became a philanthropist, diplomat, and, unfortunately,
a financial supporter of the first Russian revolution of February,
1917.

IV. IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST INTERNATIONAL ANARCHISTS
THE SOSJ ADDS AN AMERICAN GRAND PRIORY

The late 19th and early 20th century was an era of
anarchist activism. The SOSJ in Russia searched for potential allies
in its ongoing defense of Christendom. An epidemic of political
assassinations and the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905 prompted
the expansion of the Order into the United States. In 1905 Count
Alexis Ignatiev, Commander of the SOSJ Chevalier Guards, was
assassinated in Russia. Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich was also
assassinated. The Grand Duke was the patron of the Slavonic Society
of Moscow, of which Cherep Spiridovich was president. As mentioned
previously, this agency was an intelligence organization funneling
arms into the Balkans in support of nationalists struggling against
the Turks, and is believed to have been an arm of the SOSJ. These
events hastened the development of a permanent presence of the
Knights of St. John in America, in addition to their White Cross
First Aid Society, to ensure the Order’s survival and to tap the
resources of the American Republic.

At the time of his death, Grand Duke Sergei was
the Military Governor General of Moscow and had worked to uncover
the cells of anarchists who were assasinating government officials
which included his own father Czar Alexander II. His wife Grand
Duchess Elizabeth, sister of Czarina Alexandra, was involved in the
research to unmask the anarchists and this interest brought them
both into contact with an Orthodox spiritual writer named Sergei
Alexandrovich Nilus. Nilus was one of the earliest men to produce a
copy of the “Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion” and Grand Duchess
Ella introduced him and the Protocols to her sister and to Czar
Nicholas II. Major General Arthur Cherep-Spiridovich, President of
the Slavonic Society, was thereby one of the earliest members of any
Intelligence Service to see the Protocols. He was given the mandate
by the Russian Imperial family to investigate the matter fully and
to spread the alarm about “the hidden hand” of international Zionism
and its plan to gain global control through the elimination of the
Christian Church. He was made a Count of the Catholic Church by Pope
Pius X about 1907. He was President of the Catholic Grand Priory and
was one of the principal organizers of the American branch of the
SOSJ. His patronesses, Czarina Alexandra and Grand Duchess Ella,
were convinced of the authenticity of the international conspiracy
and in 1918 both of these influential women were murdered by the
Bolsheviks.

After the death of Dr. Nicholas Senn in 1908,
the American White Cross movement with headquarters in Chicago was
expanded further by union with the Knights of St. John and Malta
Hospital and Relief Association of Brooklyn, New York. The
organization was named White Cross Hospital and Relief Association.
The main offices of the relief association remained at the GAR Hall,
at 990 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. The headquarters of this new
association was apparently being prepared at what is now called the
Audubon Terrace on North Broadway in New York City. Senior knights
were building a facility to be complete in every aspect for the
conduction of the affairs of the Order. Charles Hayward and George
H. Bruce, formerly of the Knights of St John and Malta Hospital and
Relief Association, had joined with senior SOSJ knights, many of
whom were agents of the Imperial Russian Secret Service. Most of
them were Catholic Knights of Malta of the Catholic Grand Priory of
Russia, and represented many of the nations of Europe. They
considered this American association not only as a new organization
for the Americas, but as the continuation of the old Polish Grand
Priory that had been in the minority in Russia since 1815. They
printed a journal for the association called The White Cross
Knight.

Major General Arthur Cherep Spiridovich, President
of the remnant Catholic Grand Priory of Russia, was among the
coordinators of this expansion. As mentioned, the General was also
an emissary of Czarina Alexandra of Russia, Patroness of the Russian
SOSJ White Cross and of her sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth, promoter
of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and now an Orthodox nun and
superior of an Order in Moscow. As an intelligence operative, he was
handled by the Russian Ambassador to the U. S., Baron Rosen. He was
also an agent of the Serbian royal family. There began a long
relationship between the OSJ in America and the Yugoslavian and
Roumanian royal families.

Major General Cherep Spiridovich, OSJ a
founder of the OSJ American Grand
Priory

A book written by Cherep Spiridovich,
published in New
York

The four orders of St. John jockeyed for positions
of influence in American society. These included the SOSJ, the SMOM,
The German Order of St. John and the British Venerable Order of St.
John. The constant interaction with the aristocracy, nobility and
royalty of the Old World motivated some American members to become
involved in genealogical and racial studies. To qualify for
knighthood in accordance with the rules of the SOSJ was nearly
impossible for Americans. The result of the strict admittance
qualifications was the founding by private individuals of the
National Genealogical Society, the interaction with an unrecognized
College of Arms of Canada, the founding of the American Heraldry
Society, and, to some degree, the support of the early racial
eugenics movement. Various patriotic and genealogical societies were
established during this period to qualify Americans and Canadians
for OSJ knighthood. The Lords of Manors of Baltimore, Scions of
Colonial Cavaliers, Order of Colonial Dames, Imperial Order of the
Yellow Rose, and the Order of the White Crane are some of the
societies the American knights started. We will also see that
others, motivated by their affiliation with Freemasonic lodges,
attempted to advance the agenda of their fraternities by affiliation
with the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem in Russia.

In 1909, Grand Duke Vladimir was assassinated
in Russia, and his son, Grand Duke Cyril, thereby became Grand Prior
of the OSJ Russian Grand Priory. Grand Duke Vladimir had cultivated
relations between the SOSJ in Russia, the German Order of St. John
and the Spanish Order of St. John the Baptist. The German and
Spanish orders were branches of the original Order. He had also
encouraged the American members of the White Cross to further
develop those relationships. German influence on the new OSJ
American Association through the Johanniter Orden Protector Emperor
Wilhelm II and his brother Prince Henry of Prussia was evident
before World War I with exchange visits by the industrialist
Cornelius Vanderbilt and President of Columbia University Nicholas
Murray Butler, Director of OSJ Education from 1912 to 1928. German
influence also came from the Czarina and her sister Ella who were
both members of German royalty. That relationship, which developed
with both the Protestant Johanniter Orden and with the Catholic
Malteser Orden, continued from joint efforts in the Baltic during
the Russian Civil War through the redevelopment of the German
Intelligence Service after WWII.

Colonel Dr. Wm. Sohier Bryant, MD, of New York
City, and lawyer Wm. B. Stites of New Jersey wrote a constitution in
1911 to form an American Grand Priory of the Sovereign Order of St.
John of Jerusalem from members of the American White Cross. The
American Grand Priory constitution was accepted by the membership in
1912. The new Grand Priory included the Grand Priory of Russia,
i.e., the former Catholic OSJ Grand Priory of Poland. The
headquarters of the knights was initially the meeting hall of the
Knights of St. John and Malta at Wurzler’s Building, 315 Washington
Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. Most early meetings were held at Joseph
Burrows office at 56-58 Pine Street, near Wall Street. Wall Street
lawyer William Nelson Cromwell became American Grand Prior in 1912,
and meetings thereafter were usually held at his offices in the
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. According to Pichel, this continued until
1929, after which the meetings were held at Dr. Bryant’s office in
the Murray Hill section of New York City. That address was the
address of the American Heraldry Society at 1730 Broadway, and
later, by the mid 1930’s, was 30 East 40th Street, the address of Dr
Bryant’s medical office.

In 1912 the Order consisted of the Russian Grand
Priory in Russia and the new American Grand Priory and its
subsidiary, the Catholic Grand Priory of Russia, which included
remnants of the Spanish Caballeros Hospitalarios de San Juan
Bautista. The Russian Grand Priory was composed mainly of Slavic
Knights of the Orthodox Faith. The American Grand Priory leaders
were mostly socially prominent Protestant Episcopalians from New
York City and Chicago. There was also a small group of American
descendants of Catholic Celtic Jacobites, who were still followers
of the old Stuart Pretender to the throne of England and Scotland.
The Pretender at the time was Queen Mary IV of Bavaria, and an army
physician named Edgar Erskine Hume, OSJ was among those who later
considered Mary’s successor, Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht, as his
“rightful sovereign.” The American Grand Prior, William Nelson
Cromwell, and Dr. Francis C. Nicholas had had contact with Spanish
Knights of St. John during years of preparation work for the
American Panama Canal project. Interaction with the Spanish knights
was also the result of Americans meeting Spanish knights during the
Spanish-American War from 1898 to 1900, and later during the Mexican
civil wars. The remnant Castellany of Guadalajara, Mexico, of the
Spanish Order of St. John the Baptist joined the American Grand
Priory with their monarchist Pretender, Don Agustin Yturbide. King
Alphonso XIII of Spain was the protector of the remnants of the
Spanish Order which was given a papal blessing as late as 1879. He
expanded his association to the SOSJ in America.

As noted previously, American Catholics,
however, had been joining a fraternal organization similar to the
present day Knights of Columbus, called the Knights of St. John,
since it was founded in the 1880’s. By the turn of the century, a
union of all military style fraternal associations of the Catholic
Church in America, to be called the Roman Catholic Union of the
Knights of St. John, was supported by Cardinal Gibbons and
Archbishop Ireland. Therefore, Catholic knights of the SOSJ had
difficulty determining their loyalties, not only because of the
broad spectrum of their own origins and nationalities, but also
because of the presence of this non-chivalric fraternal organization
supported by the Catholic Church. The SMOM reneged on its promise to
Cardinal Gibbons to create a priory for the American fraternal
orders of Catholic knights which prompted the American Catholic
church authorities to organize the Catholic Knights of America and
the Catholic Benevolent Legion in its stead. Prominent Catholics
from the American Irish White Cross movement, associated with the
SOSJ, who were disenchanted with their order’s political leanings,
eventually founded in 1927 the American Association of the SMOM.
Edgar Erskine Hume, MD, was among the group of former members of the
SOSJ who sought admission into the Italian order.

Prince
Grand Master

Lt.
Grand Master

President of the Sovereign
Council

Grand
Prior

Grand
Chancellor

Protector

1912

Undetermined

President of the American Grand
Priory:W S Bryant

President of the White Cross
Hospital & Relief Assoc.: G.H. Bruce

President of the Latino - Slavic
League: Major General Cherep Spirodovich

President of the Polish White
Cross: Count Potocki (1917)

Russian Grand
Priory: Grand Duke Cyril Vladimiroich

American Grand Priory:
WN Cromwell

American Grand
Priory: J.G.B. Bulloch

Czar Nicholas
II

V. THE AMERICAN GRAND PRIORY VENTURES INTO FOREIGN
SERVICE

The English started a private intelligence
gathering operation supported by their government in 1904 called the
Legion of Frontiersmen. This organization, composed of wealthy
patriotic English volunteers, prefigured MI6. Members of this group,
traveling worldwide as was their customary lifestyle, became an
important source for the British Empire’s constant need for
information. The American White Cross was being used in similar
fashion, and the new American Grand Priory expanded on that
practice. The most prominent families in the United States joined
the American Grand Priory of the SOSJ, and thereby developed the
first American civilian foreign intelligence network. American
Grand Priory leaders, Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia
University, Archer Huntington, founder of the Hispanic Society of
America, William Nelson Cromwell, Wall Street lawyer and Francis C.
Nicholas, founder of the American International Academy, are among
those who crafted the American Grand Priory into an intelligence
organization. Nicholas, a mining engineer and explorer, had done
Cromwell’s Panama Canal construction feasibility studies. He had
also done geological research in Central and South America for
Archer Huntington and Colonel William Lamb, who were supplying fuel
coal to the Russian Navy. These men wielded significant influence in
the United States during the late 19th through the mid 20th
centuries.

Some results of their careers include the
founding of the Republic of Panama and the successful purchase and
construction of the Panama Canal. They were also responsible for the
founding of the Pan-American “Organization of American States” and
directly influenced the founders of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Others prominent in the OSJ at this time included John Jacob Astor
until his death on the Titanic, J. P. Morgan, J P Morgan, Jr. and
the extended Cornelius Vanderbilt and Chicago Crane families. The
Mexican White Cross association was promoted by Don Agustin
Yturbide, OSJ, Pretender to the royal throne of Mexico. Cromwell
used the College of Arms of Canada, of which Yturbide was President,
to create dissension during congressional hearings into the Panama
Canal controversy. Legalistic maneuvering about ancient French noble
rights in Canada brought pressure on Great Britain to drop
complaints about the U. S. control of the canal. This preceeded by
many decades the modern secession movement of French speaking
Canada. Grand Chancellor Bulloch was involved in this movement which
tended to divide the OSJ into Anglophile and Francophile factions.
Grand Prior Cromwell had become a seasoned veteran at creating
trusts, monopolies and even countries by using revolution if
necessary. The principle White Cross societies besides America and
Russia were located in Spain and Mexico. Dr. Francis C. Nicholas was
involved during the Mexican Civil War from 1912 to 1914 as a White
Cross “observer.” The English St. John’s Ambulance Brigade was
started in Canada, and may have helped with the founding of the
White Cross in Brooklyn as well.

The American Grand Priory also had a history of
cooperation with members of the monarchist and anti-Semitic Russian
Black Hundred’s Movement due to their association with Cherep
Spiridovich. Admiral Grand Duke Alexander Michaelovich, OSJ, was the
head of Russian Naval Intelligence. He spent time in the United
States developing relationships with the wealthiest people in
American society. His regular traveling companion became Major
Barclay Harding Warburton of the U.S. Army Military Intelligence
community. Warburton was a member of the “East Coast Establishment,”
and was closely related to the Wannamaker and Vanderbilt families.
The American Grand Priory cooperated with Russian Naval Intelligence
and the Russian Secret Service directed by Baron Rosen. Grand Duke
Alexander was elected the 73rd Grand Master of the SOSJ in
September, 1913 during meetings in New York City at the Waldorf
Astoria Hotel.

Prince
Grand Master

Lt.
Grand Master

President of the Sovereign
Council

Grand
Prior

Grand
Chancellor

Protector

1913

Grand Master Grand Duke Alexander
Michaelovich

President of the American Grand
Priory:W S Bryant

President of the White Cross
Hospital & Relief Assoc.: W.W.
Butcher

President of the Latino - Slavic
League: Major General Cherep Spirodovich

The First World War found the American Grand Priory
allying itself with the Entente against Germany. Major General
Cherep-Spiridovich had been spreading the alarm about a global
supra-national plan to gain ultimate world power through financial
and political control of the military forces of Germany and England.
He tried to warn the Americans and to strengthen the bonds between
the United States and Russia in an effort to keep Christians from
slaughtering each other. In 1915 Colonel Robert R. McCormick, of
Chicago Tribune fame, reported from the Russian front lines while
interviewing Knights of Malta who were graduates of the SOSJ Corps
des Pages. The White Cross Hospital and Relief Association of the
American Knights of Malta named its overseas work “The American
Ambulance”. Members of the American Grand Priory quickly became the
leaders of massive relief efforts during WWI.

Sir William Nelson Cromwell, OSJ, former
Grand Prior and first American President of the Sovereign
Council

Grand Prior W.N. Cromwell helped to start the
Lafayette Escadrille Flying Corps with Cornelius Vanderbilt and Dr.
Ed Gros of the American Ambulance. This Corps was later supported by
the Order of Lafayette. Rep. Hamilton Fish III of New York was both
a member of this order and the reinstituted Order of Lafayette
following WWII. Unfortunately, the SOSJ is implicated in the support
and possibly in the direction of the “bloodless revolution” in
Russia in the opening months of 1917.

Above is an excerpt from a book by
Colonel Robert McCormick. His family was among the founders of the
White Cross in Chicago. He remained an active member of the Knights
of Malta until his death in 1955.

VI. REVOLUTIONARIES WITHIN THE SOSJ CONTRIBUTE TO
ANARCHY

Until the First World War, relations between
the German Order of St. John, the English Venerable Order of the
Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, and the SOSJ were mostly
cooperative. The leaders of these organizations, many of them
members of royal houses, were often close family relatives and/or
financially interdependent. The European royal families were well
aware of the survival of the SOSJ in Russia. Queen Victoria’s son,
the Duke of Connaught, led the English Venerable Order of St. John
of Jerusalem for many decades. He was closely associated with, and
related to, Grand Duke Alexander and others of the Romanoff family.
He had been present in 1894 at the marriage of SOSJ Protector Czar
Nicholas II and Alexandra of Germany in the tiny Winter Palace
Chapel, in which the chief relics and icon of the SOSJ were
prominently venerated. Before Alexander I became its king, the Duke
of Connaught had been seriously considered for the throne of
Yugoslavia. He was Grand Duchess Victoria Melita’s uncle, and at one
time was the potential father-in-law of SOSJ Grand Master Grand Duke
Alexander’s daughter.

The Duke of Connaught, led for many decades
both the English Venerable Order and, as Grand Master of the United
Grand Lodge of England, the Masonic Knights Templar. As the English
Governor-General of Canada from 1910 to 1916, he had a relationship
with the American Masonic Knights of Malta. He also had some
influence over the American Masonic Knights Templar. Unfortunately,
the new American members of the White Cross and SOSJ American Grand
Priory did not heed the prohibitions on Freemasonic affiliation that
had been enforced in Russia. When they joined with the SOSJ from
Russia, some persisted in their Masonic affiliation as Templars. The
amalgamation of the SOSJ with the Knights of St. John and the Malta
Hospital and Relief Association brought Freemasons into the ranks of
the American Grand Priory. The new Grand Priory of 1912 was thereby
influenced by Freemasonry and Anti-Catholicism. The Freemasons who
came into the Grand Priory had believed in a descent of their
fraternity from an ill-defined Templar-Malta Order from France, or
from the old “reformed” Torpichen Preceptory in Scotland. Some of
the new members were the aforementioned Catholic Jacobites but there
was also a small but significant number of Rosicrucians. A
significant philosophy of the Rosicrucians included an anti-Semitic
and racial superiority agenda.

Some prominent members appear to have persisted in
the Freemasonic quest for humanistic “freedoms” which had caused the
downfall of so many Christian kingdoms and as noted previously was
one of the principle reasons for the loss of their predecessor’s
citadel home on Malta in 1798. Their personal philosophies also
supported the exportation of “democratic” ideals of the United
States of America, which did not translate peacefully into the needs
for social change in Imperial Russia. In Russia it was widely known
that Freemasonry had been prohibited because it is a fraternity
designed for Revolution against Christianity and against Christian
monarchs. The Knights failed to recognize the danger which they
brought upon the Order and upon Christendom by amalgamating
Freemasons into the ranks of the Knights Hospitaller.

The American Grand Prior, William Nelson
Cromwell, was a well known adept at high level regime change. The
lifestyles enjoyed by Americans, combined with the Wilsonian theme
of spreading Democracy worldwide, appear to have seduced both Grand
Master Grand Duke Alexander and Russian Grand Prior Grand Duke Cyril
into revolutionary scheming against Czar Nicholas II. Many others in
the Imperial Romanoff family were sympathetic to liberal Socialist
plans to end the absolute monarchy in Russia, and the American Grand
Priory of the SOSJ is implicated in their revolutionary activities.
Unfortunately the Czar and his wife were also influenced by
occultism which was in vogue in their society, and of which Rasputin
was an infamous practitioner. This behavior during wartime on the
part of the Czar and his family caused extreme anxiety in Russia and
helped to prompt militant action among the diverse forces determined
to transform the monarchy. The story of Rasputin’s influence on the
Imperial family and on the politics of Russia is widely known. It is
not generally known, however, that Grand Duke Alexander directed the
assassination of the spiritualist monk Gregori Rasputin in late
1916. The men directly involved in the murder of Rasputin were the
Grand Duke’s sons, son-in-law, cousin and a member of British MI6.
The Russians were all students or graduates of the SOSJ Corps des
Pages. Grand Duke Alexander afterward successfully interceded with
the czar on behalf of the assassins, all Knights of St. John.

Grand Duchess Ella was the head of the White Cross
Supreme Council in Russia which oversaw all Hospitaller activity
during WWI. In 1916, the OSJ “American Ambulance in Russia,” which
was organized by Hamilton Fish III, Dr. Philip Newton, Capt. Philip
Lydig, Nicholas Murray Butler, Colonel Robert McCormick and Colonel
Theodore Roosevelt of New York City and Chicago, started service on
the Russian Front. Their patroness was a daughter of the Czar, Grand
Duchess Tatiana Romanoff.

The American Grand Prior, William Nelson Cromwell,
distanced himself from the adventure as his name was too well
connected with American engineered foreign revolutions of the recent
past. Instead, Charles Richard Crane of the Chicago White Cross
assisted with financing revolutionary change in Russia. It appears
that once again, just as some Knights betrayed their brethren on
Malta by joining with the revolutionaries of Napoleon, members of
the Order were guilty of fratricide and denial of their Christian
faith. The American Ambulance in Russia, at least financially and
philosophically, supported the Kerensky Regime.

The Knights may have also tactically supported the
first Russian revolution in the early months of 1917 which placed
Kerensky at the head of a new Democratic government. Prime Minister
Kerensky was on the payroll of the American Ambulance. Grand Duke
Cyril was in charge of the troops available to defend the Czar in
St. Petersburg. He used his naval guard corps to passively support
the forced abdication of Czar Nicholas II. Many blamed both the
February and later the October Revolutions completely on Jewish
revolutionaries supported by Germany which was controlled by kindred
forces. However both Grand Prior Grand Duke Cyril and Grand Master
Grand Duke Alexander had naively allied themselves with the
Freemasons and other social humanists and were thus ostracized by
many Russian monarchists. The reality that the Bolsheviks used the
opportunity presented to them by the assistance to Kerensky of the
continental, English and American Freemasons was apparently a shock
to the leadership of the OSJ. They never confessed their involvement
and as a consequence the Order continued to be plagued by the
Freemasons. Grand Master Grand Duke Alexander was able to retain his
elevated status within the Russian exiled community only due to the
position of his wife, the Grand Duchess Xenia, sister of the late
Czar. Grand Duke Cyril, Protector of the SOSJ, had to outlive more
popular candidates in order for him to gain his birthright, the
leadership of the Romanov dynasty.

VII. THE KORNILOV AFFAIR

A Counter Revolution was soon planned by Russian
Guard officers under Generals Kornilov, Markov and Keller in
August/September of 1917. General Count Keller, OSJ, an intimate of
the Russian Imperial family and friend of German monarchists, was
the only general who immediately refused to accept the abdication of
the Czar to the Kerensky regime. As an influential member of the
SOSJ he singlehandedly started the resistance of the Knights of
Malta whose historical charge was the defense of Imperial Russia and
the Romanoff family.

The Monarchists managed to place many of their
sympathizers in command of the armed forces in St. Petersburg.
Colonel Pavel Bermondt, who served in an Ussuri Cossack unit of
Keller’s 3rd Cavalry Corps, was one of these officers and was given
command of an Ulan cavalry regiment in St. Petersburg. Captain
Sidney Reilly of British MI6 was also in charge of a cavalry
contingent during this conspiracy. Their plan was to coordinate the
armed members of a large number of Russian patriotic societies which
would join with an approaching Guard army under General Kornilov in
order to impose a military junta which would ‘restructure” the
Provisional Government and quell the Bolsheviks. Kerensky was
forewarned and he armed the Bolsheviks to defend his government and
the city against the Monarchists. The Kornilov uprising attempt
failed and most of the conspirators, including Bermondt, were
jailed. Many were able to escape with the assistance of
sympathizers. Kerensky had armed the Bolsheviks and the failed
Kornilov Affair had thus prepared the way for a third, but violent
revolt, in October of 1917. The October Revolution of the atheistic
Bolsheviks was successful and ultimately merciless.

As noted, the first response against the socialist
revolutionaries of the Kerensky Provisional Government came from
Count Keller, OSJ. The Count immediately started working with German
General Rudiger Von der Goltz to build a German-Russian army of
monarchist volunteers in the Baltic. This cooperation between the
German and Russian orders of St. John was the attempt to return both
Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II and a Romanoff Czar to their respective
thrones.

On September 15, 1917, J. G. B. Bulloch, MD, first
cousin of President Teddy Roosevelt, incorporated the Order of
Lafayette in New York City with an international membership as a
recruiting front for the SOSJ. An American counter revolutionary
effort became immediately prominent since it became apparent from
both government and military intelligence reports that Jewish
anarchists were in the majority in the new Bolshevik government in
St. Petersburg. The revolutionaries had developed their operational
base in the Lower East Side district of New York City and both the
American and Russian Imperial secret services frantically worked to
prevent an expected Bolshevik revolution in the United States. The
American Grand Priory became isolated due to its support of the
first “Bloodless Revolution” in Russia and thereafter remained in
the hands of operatives of the anti-Bolshevik intelligence
communities. The American Grand Priory of the SOSJ concentrated its
activities in NYC, Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington,
D.C. It worked to defeat the international anarchist movements and
to expose their aligned secret societies.

The Poles responded both to stop the Bolshevik
advance into their territory and to take advantage of their new
found independence from both Russia and Germany. The Polish White
Cross was founded in New York a few days after the Bolshevik
Revolution. Its president was Count Nicholas Potocki, OSJ. His close
relative Jerzey Potocki became Polish Ambassador to the United
States. Ignace Paderewski, the famous pianist, helped to start the
Polish White Cross in New York in October 1917 and used the
resources of the American Ambulance in Russia. His wife, Madame
Paderewski, daughter of Baron Rosen, OSJ, was Patroness of the
Polish White Cross. The Polish effort was both an intelligence
operation and relief service of the old Polish Grand Priory which
was now part of the American Grand Priory. Captain Sidney Reilly,
OSJ of MI6 and Colonel William J. Donovan, SMOM, US State Department
Intelligence, were also associates of Ignace Paderewski, who became
the first President of Free Poland.

IX. COUNT KELLER, PRINCE AWALOFF AND GRAND DUKE
CYRIL LEAD THE ORDER OF ST. JOHN AGAINST THE BOLSHEVIKS

After the failed Kornilov Affair and imprisonment,
followed by the October Revolution, many Guard officers were able to
escape and flee to the Don Cossacks in the Ukraine. There they
helped to create the Volunteer Army with the assistance of Ukrainian
separatists. Generals Alekseev, Denikin, Kornilov, Kolchak and
Keller were the early leaders and they started the Russian Civil War
to defeat the Bolsheviks.

Grand Duke Cyril was now the legal heir to the
Russian throne as he was third in line behind the heir of Czar
Nicholas II, his son Alexei and the Czar’s brother Grand Duke
Michael. Grand Duke Cyril gave his support to the remnant of the
SOSJ headed by Count Keller and his fellow Knights. The Russian
Order of St. John rallied to form a secretive organization of
officers and civilian nobility called alternately the Brothers of
the White Cross and the White Cross Society under Generals Markov
and Count Keller and the monarchist politician Markov II. The
Russian Grand Duke Cyril and the German Grand Duke of Hesse were
members of the organization as German monarchists assisted the White
Cross effort to rescue their kin, the Czarina Alexandra and her
family. American Lt. Col. Joseph Boyle and his machine gun
detachment may have been part of this effort by the Order to rescue
members of the Imperial family. Among the conspirators was the
son-in-law of Rasputin and the Czarina's best friend Anna Vyrubova.
Czarina Alexandra delayed the rescue plans of the Brothers of the
White Cross several times in her effort to regain the throne. Her
delays ultimately prevented the Brotherhood from following through
with their plans to free the Imperial family due to the progressive
consolidation of Bolshevik control. The Imperial family was murdered
by the Bolsheviks in July, 1918. The Czarina had reportedly used the
symbol of the swastika repeatedly during her captivity, had often
referred to the Brothers of the White Cross and had only two books
in her possession during her final captivity. One of them was the
Nilus book containing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These
findings fueled the hatred of the Bolsheviks and of their conspiracy
for global domination. The historical record shows that Count Keller
and most of the well known General officers from the SOSJ fought for
Imperial Russia until killed in action against the Bolsheviks during
the following year.

General Markov had been the Director of the
Nicholas Cavalry School in St. Petersburg. This school was a post
graduate school for the elite cavalry Guard officers most of whom
came from the SOSJ Corps des Pages. Markov organized his Guard
officers on February 12, 1918 and instituted a black Maltese cross
badge for those in his unit. Count Keller, OSJ, was a graduate of
the Nicholas Cavalry School and his uncle had been one of the last
Commandants of the OSJ Corps des Pages. General Keller used a large
plain white Maltese cross breast badge for all officers under his
command. The belief in an international socialist conspiracy led by
Zionists was central to their understanding of the revolution. Count
Keller also worked with monarchist German General Rudiger Von der
Goltz to start a German backed government in the Baltic and
recruited Russian POW’s in Germany for this army. As noted earlier
their combined plan was to join their forces in an attempt to
replace the rightful monarchs both in Germany and in Russia. Colonel
Bermondt was the chief of counter intelligence for the Southern Army
under Hereditary Knight Commander George Duke Leuktenburg, OSJ.
Major Walter Nicolai, head of all German military intelligence
during World War I, was assigned to work with Bermondt by the famous
German General Ludendorff. They promoted the Protocols of the Wise
Men of Zion and the international conspiracy theory widely among the
White Russian and later among the German troops in the Baltic.

General Count Keller,
OSJ

Metropolitan Tikhon, Patriarch and Saint
of the Russian Orthodox
Church

General Keller, OSJ, had been offered the command
of the Southern Army but insisted on leading only a Russian
monarchist army in the expected campaign against the Bolsheviks. He
believed that Russian patriots would rally to the just cause and was
concerned with conspiratorial elements within both the German armies
and the German state. He eventually accepted the command of an
all-Russian monarchist Northern Army. Metropolitan Tikhon, who was
the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, had previously
reserved his personal involvement in the counter revolution. He
significantly gave his personal blessing to Count Keller as the
leader of the crusade against the Bolsheviks. This blessing by the
Patriarch of the Eastern Catholic Church and later the support of
the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which recognized Grand Duke
Cyril as the heir to the Russian throne, helped to sustain the Order
of St. John during the difficult years which followed. Keller
adopted a white Maltese Cross breast plate for his officers and
planned to lead a Russian monarchist army led by Knights of the
Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem in the crusade against
the Bolsheviks. General Keller was soon fighting Ukrainian Socialist
formations and was captured in Kiev with the remnant of the
anti-Bolshevik army in December 1918. Colonel Bermondt had joined
Keller's forces in the Ukraine. Bermondt and many of his fellow
Monarchists were once again jailed. This time they were scheduled
for execution. Count Keller was shot by the Bolsheviks while in
captivity. Fortunately a German army freed many of the Russian
officers, including Bermondt, and took them back to Germany where
they were interned near Berlin in Camp Salzvedel. German Monarchists
had taken up the cause of the Russian White Guard because they faced
the same threat of international Bolshevism from their own Socialist
Weimar Government.

A jewelled insignia of the Order
in gold, silver, white enamel and diamonds; the reverse of the
trophy with doubled ribbon-ring, this struck with the cyrillic
maker‘s mark "M. BERSH & Co." and gold assay mark; ribbon,
missing; in old, fitted case, covered with dark green morocco, lined
with blue silk. A magnificent and most rare piece, traditionally
belonged to Lt. General Count Keller, a famous personality of
Russian history from the beginning of XX Century, to the Civil
War.Dim. 7,8 x 3,1 cm.

40.000,00 / 48.000,00 € SOLD €
41.000,00

X. THE LINEAGE OF THE SOVEREIGN ORDER OF SAINT
OF JERUSALEM

The SOSJ ties with the Germans before the war
encouraged by the Russian Grand Prior Grand Duke Vladimir were
bearing fruit for the exiled knights who had survived the
Revolution. Beside his association with Grand Prior William Nelson
Cromwell, Colonel Bermondt now became connected with other members
of the American Grand Priory and to Boris Brasol and Major General
Count Cherep Spiridovich due to their mutual work against the
globalist’s agenda. It must also be remembered that the whereabouts
of Grand Duke Alexander, then regarded as the leader of the OSJ, was
unknown. His fate was uncertain as he was last known to be under
house arrest by the Bolsheviks in the Crimea. It was in Camp
Salzvedel, near Berlin, during January to April 1919 that Colonel
Bermondt re-organized Russian Guard officers to continue the crusade
of the Sovereign Russian Imperial Order of Saint John of Jerusalem
against the Bolsheviks. It had been started by General Count Keller
with the blessing of the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.
This time the Knights had the legitimate heir to the Russian Throne,
the son of the late grand Duke Vladimir, the Grand Duke Cyril, as
both the Protector of the Order and financier of the Order's field
operations.

The West Volunteer Army was led by
officers who were Knights of Malta. The Russian formations
were led by Knights of the Sovereign Order of Saint John of
Jerusalem. The German formations were led by members of the
German Order of St. John, the Johanniter
Orden.

It is important to state here that the historic Sovereign Order
of St. John of Jerusalem was legitimately continued outside of
Russia by Grand Duke Cyril, the legal heir to the deceased Czar
Nicholas II. The Czarovich, Alexei, had been killed with his father.
Grand Duke Michael had abdicated the throne within 24 hours of
accepting it and his whereabouts were now unknown. With the
recognition of the new Protector of the Order, with the blessing of
Patriarch Tikhon, the supreme head of the Russian Orthodox Church
and, as we shall see, with the consent of the Knights in the United
States, the continuation of the OSJ under Prince Awaloff was
successfully accomplished.

A rough translation from Prince Awaloff's
Memoirs.

The Order recognized Grand Duke Cyril as the legal heir and the
leaders of the OSJ field forces were in turn recognized by the Grand
Duke Cyril. The principals of this recognition have handed down the
Order in unbroken fashion to the Knights of Justice who have
continued their work into the 21st century. There is no other
organization that either has claimed in the past, or claims now, its
descent from the Order of St. John of Jerusalem in Russia that
recognized, and was recognized by, the legitimate heir Grand Duke
Cyril immediately after the murder of Czar Nicholas and his son.
Neither can any organization claim the black mantle of the Order of
the Knights of Malta which has not continuously and publicly stood
in opposition to the satanic conspiracy that relentlessly works
toward the destruction of Christendom.

The West Volunteer Army was led by officers who
were Knights of Malta. The Russian formations were led by Knights of
the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. The German
formations were often led by men who were both Knights of the German
Order of St. John, the Johanniter Orden and of the Sovereign Order
of St. John of Jerusalem.

Prince Awaloff-Bermondt,
OSJ

Major General Graf von der Goltz,
Johanniter Orden

On March 4, 1919 by Order number 24 Colonel
Bermondt made the Maltese cross breast badge the emblem of his SOSJ
army and enameled it black in memory of General Graf Keller. High
level German nationalists backed this re-establishment of the
Russian Sovereign Imperial Order of St. John of Jerusalem. Among
them was General Ludendorff who had been Chief of Staff of the
German Army during WWI. His chief intelligence officer Major Walter
Nicholai was also involved. The Protector of the Order was the
legitimate heir to the Russian throne, Grand Duke Cyril
Vladimirovich. Grand Duke Cyril continued to finance the SOSJ
venture with the help of the American Grand Priory. Prince Awaloff
and Grand Duke Cyril planned to join with German forces to drive the
Bolsheviks out of the Baltic. This idea to cooperate with Germany
was unique to these Knights of St. John who believed that
Russian-German cooperation was the only way to rid the world of the
Bolsheviks.

In 1919 Colonel Prince Pavel Awaloff-Bermondt,
supported by the Johanniter Orden, the Romanoff Pretender Grand Duke
Cyril, and American financier J. P. Morgan, Jr., OSJ, became
Commander in chief of the Russian Imperial Army. He led the SOSJ and
apparently Johanniter-Orden plan, financed through attorney W. N.
Cromwell, OSJ, American Grand Prior, to clear the Bolsheviks from
the Baltic and to set up a pro-German government. Most of the
officials of what became known in the Fall of 1919 as the West
Russian Government were members of the OSJ. Prince Awaloff recorded
much of this information in his memoirs which he wrote in 1925 in
Hamburg, Germany.

In the Fight Against Bolshevism: Memoirs
of General Prince Awaloff Commander-in-Chief of the
German-Russian West Army in the
Baltic

Front

Prince Awaloff's personal banner of the
Graf Keller Corps, Sovereign Order of Saint John of
Jerusalem

Reverse

Black Maltese Cross with Crown of Thorns,
memorializes General Graf Keller, OSJ, murdered by the
Bolsheviks

XI. THE BALTIC CAMPAIGN OF THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA

Bermondt was first addressed by the royal title
of Prince Awaloff in September, 1919. Prince Awaloff states that he
was adopted at this time by Prince Michael Awaloff from whom he
gained the royal title. Records are unavailable and since there was
uncertainty in 1919 about where the title came from it is possible
that Bermondt was elected Grand Master of the Sovereign Order of St.
John of Jerusalem which would have given him the royal title of
Prince. We must wait for further information to confirm this
suspicion and we therefore retain the claims of Grand Duke Alexander
as Grand Master during this period. During the Baltic campaign,
Rudolf Baron von Engelhardt and Baron Engelhardt-Schnellenstein,
both close relatives of Lt. Grand Master Alphons Heribert Scipio
Baron von Engelhardt-Schnellenstein (1954-1956) and Admiral Felix
Count von Luckner, who also became the Lt. Grand Master of the OSJ
(1962-1966) worked with Prince Awaloff in the Baltic venture. The
Bavarian Freikorps, some of whom were associated with the Stewart
Pretender, Crown Prince Rupprecht, wore the Maltese Cross. (The
connection between the Royal Stuart Jacobite Pretender in Bavaria
and the Order is not fully understood. We do know that General Hume
did have a relationship with the Crown Prince.)

The relics and icon were rescued from the SOSJ
Priory at the Gatchina Palace outside of St. Petersburg in October,
1919, by men of the army of the White Russian General Yudenitch.[1]
They were brought to Reval, Estonia, and delivered to the former
Russian Master of Court Ceremonies Count Alexei Ignatiev. Ignatiev
was head of the Russian White Cross in Estonia, a leader of the
Russian SOSJ and a son of the murdered Count Ignatiev, Commander of
the SOSJ Chevalier Guards. The relics and icon were then delivered
to the SOSJ headquarters in Mitau and there were solemnly received
by Prince Awaloff and General Von der Goltz. Later the relics and
icon were placed in the hands of the Romanov Queen Mother, Dagmar
Feodorovna. She kept the relics at Villa Hvidore, her residence in
exile near Copenhagen, until her death in 1928. Awaloff proclaimed
himself Governor-General of Western Russia for a brief time in late
1919. The short-lived government in the Duchy of Courland, Latvia,
with headquarters in Mitau, was the closest that the Order had come
to gaining a permanent sovereign territory since the loss of Malta
in 1798.

There were other plans by Russian exiles to retake
their country. One of them was planned and undertaken by Baron Taube
as potential Secretary of State who enlisted Russian Jewish bankers
to fund General Yudenitch in an attempt to retake St. Petersburg
with a Northwestern Army. They also would have supported Grand Duke
Cyril as the new Czar. Their White Russian army in northwestern
Russia ultimately failed in its attempt to take St. Petersburg.
Awaloff refused to place his command under General Yudenitch and
Baron Taube, whom he considered to be controlled by “conspiratorial
forces,” that is, the Jewish bankers. Baron Taube eventually became
an antagonist of the SOSJ.

Knight Commander Raben,
OSJ

Lt. Grand Master Felix Graf von Luckner,
OSJ

The Western Russian Volunteer Army of Prince
Awaloff initially gained advantage and took Riga from the
Bolsheviks. However, the British Naval Squadron that had been
supporting the left flank of General Yudenitch’s drive into St.
Petersburg for political reasons abandoned Yudenitch and directed
its guns upon Awaloffs’ forces. This intervention caused the defeat
of both the SOSJ anti-Bolshevik force of Prince Awaloff and of the
drive into St. Petersburg by General Yudenitch. The Knights of St.
John ultimately retreated into Germany due to lack of support from
the socialist Weimar Government and the treason of the Entente
British and French governments. These entities propped up the
Bolshevik regime which was about to crumble. The result of this
intervention was 75 years of Communist dictatorship for a large
portion of the world. The Knights of this army of the Sovereign
Order of St. John of Jerusalem became known as the “Baltic
Brotherhood.”

When the SOSJ was exiled from the Russian Imperial
City its historic mission as defender of the Catholic Church and
secondary mission to defend Orthodox Russia brought it into
opposition to those Orders of St. John that were connected to
Freemasonry. The Order had been forced from Malta by the
revolutionaries. It was widely known that Grand Master Czar Paul I
had been killed by Freemasons, and that Czar Alexander II was killed
by anarchists with cabalistic backgrounds. It was acknowledged that
these same revolutionary philosophies were now responsible for the
loss of yet another Christian monarchy, and for the deaths of Czar
Nicholas II and his family. This included, among the many members of
the OSJ who were murdered by the Bolsheviks: the Patroness of the
American Grand Priory relief operation, Grand Duchess Tatiana, the
Patroness of the White Cross, Czarina Alexandra and the Protector
and leader of the SOSJ, Czar Nicholas II.

Grand Duke Alexander and his immediate family
survived the Bolshevik purge of the Romanovs during a long captivity
in the Crimea. Grand Master Grand Duke Alexander’s friend, Major
Warburton, was the U.S. Military Charge d’Affaires in Paris at the
end of the war. When rescued by the British navy Alexander went
straight to Paris. He attempted to get into the international peace
talks which followed WW I to plea for help for those trapped inside
Russia. He was refused admission to the peace conference and all of
his personal efforts failed to save any of the Russian Imperial
Family, who had, unknown to him, already been murdered by the
Bolsheviks. Thereafter, it appears that Grand Master Grand Duke
Alexander could not cope with his involvement in the first
revolution which installed the Provisional Government. All of his
brothers were killed by the Bolsheviks soon after they seized power
from the Kerensky regime. The Grand Duke spent the rest of his life
involved in spiritualism, apparently attempting to gain forgiveness
from his murdered brother-in-law, Czar Nicholas II.

XII. THE AMERICAN GRAND PRIORY JOINS THE
FIGHTAGAINST THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONALE

The American Grand Priory was peopled with the
scions of Wall Street and the “Eastern Establishment”. These men and
women, many of them active or reserve officers in the military,
worked with the fledgling western military intelligence communities
and made the Grand Priory the first civilian foreign intelligence
organization in the United States. Their intimate associates
included the brothers John Foster and Allen Welsh Dulles who were
nephews of U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing. Both were Wall
Street lawyers who worked directly for William Nelson Cromwell, OSJ.
John Foster Dulles eventually became President Eisenhauer’s
Secretary of State, and Allen Welsh Dulles was instrumental in
founding the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. One of the Chicago
Crane sons became Asst. Secretary of State under Lansing. Another
close associate was Wall Street lawyer “Wild Bill” William J.
Donovan, who founded the Office of Strategic Services, and
eventually became a knight of the SMOM. As a result of the “success”
of SOSJ international ventures President Woodrow Wilson and his
friend Colonel Edward M. House had created “The Inquiry” at the
American Grand Priory headquarters on upper Broadway in New York
City in 1917. This early “think tank” became the internationalist
advisory Council on Foreign Relations in 1921, which, ironically, is
widely thought to be one of the controlling institutions of the “One
World Conspiracy.” The American Knights of Malta continued to be
active in humanitarian affairs to provide relief for the refugees,
the poor and the disabled which the war had created. The American
Irish White Cross relief effort was operated by future founders of
the American SMOM, James Phelan and Judge Morgan J. O’Brien.

Grand Duke Cyril became the head of a secret army
scattered around the world in which the SOSJ played a significant
role. In New York City alone there were reportedly three thousand
former White Russian military officers organizing for
counter-revolution. The SOSJ was an important participant in
counter-revolutionary engagement in Eastern Europe throughout the
20th century. It engaged in small unit warfare in the regions
controlled by the Communists.

Cherep Spiridovich was personally presented to J.
Edgar Hoover by the US Ambassador to Romania, T. Tileston Wells, and
was supported by Grand Duke Cyril’s U.S. representative, Boris
Brasol, OSJ, by U.S. Treasury Secretary, Robert McAdoo and of course
by the Chicago Crane family. Many of the White Russian armed forces
were encamped in the Balkan countries after the Russian Civil War.
These forces, often led by Knights of Malta, represented the “fifty
American oriented strongholds” which were promised in Eastern Europe
by Cherep Spiridovich to Hoover and Lansing during his
presentations.

Presented as a private alternative to the
League of Nations, the A-L-S (Anglo-Latino-Slavic) League, which was
the remnant of the SOSJ in Eastern Europe, had been a bulwark
against the spread of Islam. It now was promoted as a force against
the new menace of Bolshevism. This A-L-S League was soon being
called the Anti-Bolshevist League. Cromwell, the Dulles brothers,
and the Masonic Knights Templar T. Tileston Wells founded, in 1920,
the Society of Friends of Romania as a successor to the American
Romanian Relief Council with the help of the Romanian Royal Family.
Queen Marie was a prominent member of the OSJ. There is evidence
that Count A. Cherep-Spiridovich’s presentation of the
Anglo-Latino-Slavic League to J. Edgar Hoover of the Justice
Department’s Bureau of Investigation, and to Secretary of State
Robert Lansing was the impetus for founding the Society of Friends
of Albania, and later the Society of Friends of Yugoslavia. In 1941,
the American Friends of Yugoslavia was begun by Wm. J. Donovan,
founder of the OSS and Hamilton Fish Armstrong, long serving First
Secretary of the CFR. At this time, the “Little Entente” was created
by the Balkan countries as a mutual protection pact, and the
American “societies of friends” allowed for civilian “access” in the
fledgling efforts to contain the Bolsheviks.

The Order gathered intelligence on the
international revolutionary movements. The SOSJ, under Czar Kirill
I, engaged in psychological warfare operations including the
distribution of anti-Bolshevist information such as the “Protocols
of the Elders of Zion.” This document allegedly details a plot by
elite Jews to control the world through finance, and it has been the
cause of political and social unrest during the past one hundred
years. Because it was an incontrovertible fact that the Communist
movement in Russia was dominated by Jews from New York, the American
military intelligence community continued to join the ranks of the
SOSJ as sworn enemies of the “International Conspiracy.” Among those
included were the following: Colonel Harris Ayres Houghton, MD,
Colonel John Jacob Astor, Major General Ralph Van Deman, Colonel
William Sohier Bryant, MD, Major General Frederick Dent Grant,
Colonel Nicholas Biddle, Major Barclay Harding Warburton, Major
Walter Miller, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, Colonel Theodore
Roosevelt, Major John B. Trevor and Captain Sidney Reilly. All of
these prominent members of the armed forces have close association
with their successors in the Military Affairs Committee of the SOSJ
that are found in the Order records well into the 1980’s.

Civilian experts in the early 20th century on
the so-called “Jewish Problem” became involved with the SOSJ. Among
them were Paquita de Shishmareff, Fr. Denis Fahey, Lady Edith Starr
Miller Queenborough, John B. Trevor, Jr. and Princess Julia Grant
Cantacuzene. Much of their knowledge had been gained from the work
of Monseigneur Jouin of France, who, with the blessing of the pope,
researched and wrote about secret societies involved with the occult
and humanist movements. Father Ernest Jouin appears to have been
associated with A. Cherep Spriridovich, OSJ in this research during
the early decades of the last century. All the work of the knights
of the SOSJ to include research and education efforts did help the
Vatican and the monarchies of Sweden, Spain and Denmark to survive.
Unfortunately, the knights failed to prevent the collapse of the
Balkan monarchies that resulted from the Allied “victory” after
WWII.

The Russian Grand Priory of the Sovereign Order of
St. John of Jerusalem had been first re-organized by the monarchists
in the Ukraine as an anti-Bolshevik army. German General Ludendorf
assigned Walter Nicholai, the leader of German Military Intelligence
during WWI, to develop the Order’s intelligence service for Grand
Duke Cyril Vladimirovich. After the defeat of the army in the Baltic
campaign the OSJ essentially became a paramilitary intelligence
agency. In 1916 Russian Secret Service Lieutenant Boris Brasol had
been stationed permanently in New York City. He developed a career
as an anti-Bolshevik expert and informer with American Military
Intelligence and the fledgling intelligence department of the United
States Department of State after the Bolshevik Revolution. Boris
Brasol and Cherep Spiridovich were the principal SOSJ intelligence
operatives in the United States. Brasol helped Major General Cherep
Spiridovich redirect SOSJ activities in the West against
international anarchism and the globalist agenda. They both
championed the validity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. An
associate of Prince Awaloff, General Constantin Sakharov, was head
of the military division of the Russian Grand Priory. That division
came to be known under the front name of Russian National Society.
The Russian National Society worked from offices at 5 Columbia
Circle in Manhattan from 1921.

Prince Awaloff and Leaders of the Order
of St. John in 1921

Grand Duke Cyril, the Heir Apparent, declared
himself Protector of the Russian Throne in July, 1922. He positioned
his government in Lubeck, Germany where he was titled from 1918 to
1938 as Sovereign Prince Bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church. His
wife’s ancestral home was a castle in Coberg, Bavaria, and this
became his initial residence. He created his Court and permanent
residence on the seacoast of France in St. Briac, Brittany.
Supported by nationalist elements of the German government since the
Russian Civil War, he had been the nominal head of the pro-German
Western Russian Government in northwest Europe in 1919. Walter
Nicholai, the leader of German Military Intelligence during WWI,
expanded the SOSJ intelligence service for Grand Duke Cyril
Vladimirovich in order to closely cooperate with Aufbau. Aufbau was
the White Russian monarchical organization which was founded to
coordinate the future economic recovery of Russia.

Colonel Nicholai founded Organization Consul (C), a
“full-service” intelligence operation which matched the Bolsheviks
in ability to assassinate leaders of the opposition. The strategy
used for the anti-Bolshevik campaign was taken from the Kornilov
Affair. A coalition of patriotic societies had been made to ensure
the allegiances of the participants in the planned St. Petersburg
coup. A similar strategy was repeated in the United States by John
B. Trevor’s Coalition of Patriotic, Fraternal and Civic Societies.
During the Munich “Beer Hall Putsch” of 1923 the National Socialists
used the United Patriotic Associations of Bavaria. Numerous small
organizations, all dedicated to patriotic causes, but invariably
anti-Bolshevik, were being organized for future use by militant
nationalists.

The OSJ propaganda effort continued both in the
United States and in Europe with centers in Belgrade, Paris, Erfurt,
Hamburg, Chicago and New York City. Nicholas Markov II edited in
1920 the White Cross anti-Bolshevik journal in Hamburg and later
moved to Paris. Still later, in the 1930’s he joined Ulrich
Fleischauer’s Welt Dienst in Erfurt. Henry Ford from the United
States published his own literature and financed a detective agency
with headquarters in Chicago and New York City to assist in
uncovering the global plans of “The International Jew”. He helped to
finance the similar pursuits which came under the direction of Grand
Duke Cyril’s intelligence service. This expanded and culminated in a
vast propaganda arm which worked against the international
conspiracy from government run offices in the German Third Reich
throughout WWII. Beside Markov II, the Baltic Germans Ullrich
Fleischauer, Shabellski-Bork, Alfred Rosenberg, Fedor Vinberg and
Eugen von Engelhardt, of the Fichte-Bund, were among those active in
the information campaign until the closing days of WWII. All over
Europe and the United States, small print shops produced information
which was distributed at cost in an effort to stay the spread of
militant Socialism. The headquarters for the centralized educational
campaign during the lifetime of Czar Kirill I was in Erfurt,
Germany. Until his death in 1938, Grand Duke Cyril had been the
chosen candidate of Hitler for Czar of Russia when the Soviet Union
was defeated. After his death the center for the propaganda campaign
was moved to Hamburg, Germany under the direction of Alfred
Rosenberg.

XIV. THE SOSJ GOVERNMENT IS MOVED TO THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA

Because many exiled Russians were seeking permanent
residence in the United States and Canada, from where much of the
financial support for the exiled Russian Imperial Court originated,
the shift of SOSJ leadership to the American Grand Priory was a
natural process. Baron Rosen, former Russian Ambassador to the
United States, and now head of Grand Duke Cyril’s Intelligence
operation in the United States, was run down and killed by an
automobile in New York City on December 31, 1921. Prince Awaloff was
accused as a terrorist in connection with Organization Consul and
expelled from Germany in 1922 by the Socialist Weimar Government. He
and Ataman Semenoff traveled to New York City and were involved with
meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel offices of American Grand
Prior William Nelson Cromwell. This resulted in the formal
re-establishment of the Sovereign Council of the Order on September
5, 1922. Cromwell became the President of the Sovereign Council of
the SOSJ. Prince Awaloff returned to Europe later that year to
continue the work of the Counter-Revolution, and the American Grand
Priory assumed operational control of the SOSJ. Grand Master Grand
Duke Alexander, as mentioned previously, continued to have little to
do with the SOSJ after the Civil War. He spent much of his time
traveling and writing his memoirs and books on spirituality.

Prince
Grand Master

Lt.
Grand Master

President of the Sovereign
Council

Grand
Prior

Grand
Chancellor

Protector

1919

Grand Duke Alexander Michaelovich

Cmndr-in-Chief Prince Pavel
Awaloff-Bermondt

W.N. Cromwell

Grand Duke Cyril
Vladimirovich

1922

Grand Duke Alexander
Michaelovich

Cmndr-in-Chief Prince Pavel
Awaloff-Bermondt

W.N. Cromwell

President of the American Grand
Priory: John J. Sheridan

President of the White Cross
Hospital & Relief Assoc.: W.W.
Butcher

President of the Polish White
Cross: Count Potocki

President of the Latino - Slavic
League: Major General Cherep Spirodovich

The Order was re-organized after the establishment
of the Sovereign Council in New York City. The plan centered on
strategies to counter the Bolshevist threat to Christendom and was
patterned on Major General Arthur Cherep Spiridovich’s Anglo-
Latino-Slavic League and on the patriotic organization coalitions.
Patriotic organizations in the United States were associated with
John B. Trevor’s American Coalition of Patriotic, Civic and
Fraternal Societies. During most of the interwar years they were
under the direction of the President of the Sovereign Council,
Cromwell, who had his offices at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Dr. James Gaston Baillie Bulloch, MD was the
archivist of the Order from 1922 to 1928 and the Grand Chancellor
from 1928 until his death in 1934. Bulloch was one of the principals
who chartered the American Heraldry Society in 1924 in the District
of Columbia from which were recruited candidates for the Order of
St. John. Charles Pichel and William Sohier Bryant, MD operated the
American Heraldry Society in New York City out of an office in the
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel with which they attempted to provide the
necessary noble titles to prospective American Knights from 1925 to
1931. Cromwell apparently resigned from the Council at about the
same time, circa 1931, that Pichel and Bryant moved their office to
1730 Broadway in New York City. The principle organization for
recruiting Knights from the Hispanic countries of the Americas was
the Order of St. John the Baptist of America. It was led from 1923
by Francis C. Nicholas. Upon his death in 1937 it was led by Colonel
Dr. Dimas-Aruti, DDM and following him by Major Alan Weaver Hazelton
after 1945. There was an aligned Order of St. John the Baptist of
Puerto Rico and an Orden de San Juan Bautista de Cadiz, Spain which
has survived until the present day. Pichel converted to Catholicism
in 1932 and soon became a principal of the SOSJ through his mentor
Grand Prior Fr. Joseph Paul Chodkiewicz, a leader of the Polish
White Cross in upstate New York. Pichel became Grand Chancellor of
the SOSJ in the heyday of the National Socialist Movement after the
death of J. G. B. Bulloch, MD in 1934. The President of the
Sovereign Council from 1932 to 1944 was Colonel Dr. William Sohier
Bryant, MD, OSJ. After Cromwell stepped down from the Sovereign
Council in 1932 and Czar Kirill I died in 1938, Dr. Bryant and Grand
Chancellor Pichel gained complete control of the Order.

On June 24, 1925 Eleazar Wilson of Philadelphia
became Grand Prior of America. In 1925 Captain Sidney G. Reilly,
founder of the Anti-Bolshevist League, was lured from the United
States into Russia and killed by the Bolsheviks. The exploits of
Reilly later prompted the “James Bond” series. In 1926 Cherep
Spiridovich incorporated the Anti-Bolshevist Publishing Association
of the Anti-Bolshevist League in Albany, N.Y. with H. V. Broenstrupp
and G. M. Sykes. This was an SOSJ project of the Kirill intelligence
service planned by Captain Reilly and by Cherep Spiridovich. It was
intended to provide propaganda about the danger of the
internationalist’s agenda and was the continuation of the publishing
operation of Cherep Spiridovich in Paris from 1904 to 1920, known as
the Agence Latine. It had been continued in 1921 for a few years by
Henry Ford and his newspaper the Dearborn Independent. Major General
Cherep Spiridovich, OSJ was assassinated at his residence on Staten
Island, N. Y., a few months after re-starting the publishing
operation. Boris Brasol provided the funds to bury this leader of
the SOSJ. Cherep Spiridovich was one of the principal founders of
the American Grand Priory of the Sovereign Order of St. John of
Jerusalem. H. V. Broenstrupp, OSJ published “The Hidden Hand” by
Cherep Spiridovich shortly after the assassination of his adoptive
father.

The SOSJ continued to raise funds for the relief of
Russian exiles. The “Monday Supper Opera Club” was one of the
society programs. Leaders of the relief fund drives included the
following: Captain George Djamgaroff, Mrs. Henry P. Loomis, Princess
Julia Grant Cantacuzene, Representative Hamilton Fish, III, Count
Paul Ignatieff, President of Columbia University Nicholas Murray
Butler and many of the displaced former royals of Russia and Eastern
Europe. Djamgaroff and Loomis were close friends of Czar Krill and
Czarina Victoria Melita.

In 1927, after the assassination of Count
Cherep-Spiridovich, the SMOM started their American Association.
This founding of the American Association of the Sovereign Military
Order of Malta was the unintended result of SOSJ success at fund
raising. The new Catholic association overshadowed the SOSJ and
placed its future in jeopardy. In response to SMOM propaganda, many
members, such as Colonel Edgar Erskine Hume, MD, left the SOSJ. The
remaining members were predominantly nationalistic, anti-Communist,
senior military and intelligence officers. Some Protestant former
SOSJ knights joined a new English Venerable Order American Chapter.
It is probable that the Episcopalian Archbishop of New York, William
T. Manning, a good friend of N. M. Butler and the Serbian Orthodox
Church, was among this group.

Fr. J. P. Chodkiewicz and exiled Polish leaders
started the Polish Nobility Association in 1927. He continued Cherep
Spiridovich’s Slavonic Society work, which focused on pan-Slavism
and he named it the Pan-Slavic Commonwealth of Nations.
Cherep-Spiridovich’s work had resulted in the Intermarium Movement.
Cherep Spiridovich had suggested to President of the Sovereign
Council W. N. Cromwell a project similar to the Panama Canal which
would create a navigable waterway link from the Baltic to the Black
Sea. SOSJ knights leading the Counter Revolutionary Anti-Bolshevist
League continued to promote the theme of a continuous Eastern
European buffer zone of free, independent and usually monarchical
states. The OSJ was also involved with the Columbian Lighthouse
Project in the Dominican Republic as part of their pan-American
project. N. M. Butler was the American head of the lighthouse
project and is credited with bringing it to final completion.

XV. THE EXILED ROMANOV FAMILY DEFEATS ITSELF

Grand Duke Cyril declared himself Czar Kirill I on
August 31, 1924. The White Russians in exile had a power struggle
for the throne which started during the Russian Civil War. The
failure to make a successful coalition of exiled forces which
resulted made all their efforts to retake Russia from the Bolsheviks
ineffective. Though Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich received more
support until his death in 1929, as time passed Cyril was recognized
as the rightful heir to the throne. The senior Knights of Malta on
the Sovereign Council in the United States always supported Grand
Duke Cyril, and, as noted, they became very influential because of
financial support to his cause from men as prominent as Henry Ford.

Upon the death of the Dowager Empress in 1928,
her daughter, Grand Duchess Xenia, became a Patroness of the SOSJ.
She sent the OSJ relics to the new ROCA Cathedral in Berlin where
Prince Awaloff resided. Records show that the Russian Orthodox
Metropolitan Anthony took receipt of the relics in Berlin. Grand
Prior Grand Duke Alexander ensured that his wife Xenia, sister of
Czar Nicholas II, did not separate the relics and icon. Colonel
Vasilieff, the last Czarist Chief of Police, died in 1928.

The illness and death of the Queen Mother in 1928
also prompted a group of SOSJ Russian Hereditary Commanders, who
were not tainted by revolutionary support for the Kerensky regime,
to attempt to reorganize the Russian Grand Priory in Paris. Most of
them had supported the Russian pretender Grand Duke Nicholas and the
pro-Entente Monarchist Supreme Council in Paris, but they still
asked Grand Duke Alexander to be their Grand Prior. They then pled
as the “Russian Grand Priory” for admission to the SMOM in Rome, but
were denied due to their Orthodox religion. Their “expert” legal
counsel was Baron Michael von Taube, who at the time was under the
erroneous impression that the SOSJ had been dissolved in Russia in
1817. This was the same Taube, who as a minion of the so-called
Conspiracy, had been an adversary of Prince Awaloff during the
campaign against the Bolsheviks in Western Russia in 1919. Because
of his reputation as an expert on Russian history, von Taube created
widespread doubt about the historical continuation of the SOSJ in
Russia. His theory became the legend of the suppression of the Order
in Russia, which is still widely believed even in the 21st century.
The Order still retains letters from Prince Serge Troubetzkoy, OSJ
which discuss von Taube, who was a Roman Catholic, and his
extravagant lifestyle in Rome at the expense of impoverished Russian
exiles. It was not until 1950 that von Taube found the documentary
evidence that caused him to change his mind, and after which, he
recanted his belief in the 1817 demise of the SOSJ in Russia. When
the facts about the Russian survival of the SOSJ became known in
1950, von Taube disclaimed the Prince Awaloff, Vladimirovichi and
King Alexander I succession of the SOSJ in an attempt to save his
reputation. He was little more than an agent of the SMOM at this
time. However, the damage had been done, and because of the deaths
of so many of the SOSJ royals, his disclaimer went unchallenged and
has had longstanding effect on the Order.

Shipping receipts show that the SOSJ relics and
icon were moved again in 1932, and sent to King Alexander I of
Yugoslavia. Grand Duchess Xenia and her close associate Prince
Dolguruky, one of the 1928 Paris Hereditary Commanders, were
signatories on the transfer. An Officer Candidate School similar to
the Corps des Pages had been started in Belgrade. Many of the cadets
from the Russian military academies had been sent there after the
defeat of the White Russians. (The cadets from this school fought as
a corps for the Nazi’s in 1945 during the fall of Berlin). The
Yugoslavian capital was becoming the White Russian center for
military activity. Charles Pichel, OSJ directed a study on the
Maltese Nobility done by Lord Dorchester of England which assisted
Grand Duke Cyril and Grand Duchess Victoria Melita. For this
research, he was named Grand Chancellor of the SOSJ in 1934 upon the
death of J.G.B. Bulloch.

Grand Master Grand Duke Alexander died in France in
1933, followed closely by many leading SOSJ members from either
natural causes or assassination. SOSJ Protector King Alexander I of
Yugoslavia was assassinated in 1934 on a trip to France. Queen Marie
of Romania and Czarina Victoria Melita Romanov, grand daughters of
Queen Victoria, both died in 1936. Mdme Paderewski, Patroness of the
Polish White Cross, died in Switzerland in 1936. The death of Czar
Kirill I in 1938 left the SOSJ without a Protector for the first
time since the 12th century.

XVI. THE SOSJ SUPPORTS FASCISM TO DEFEAT
BOLSHEVISM

The death of Grand Master G. D. Alexander coincided
with the victory of the NAZI party in Germany. Prince Pavel
Awaloff-Bermondt was elected the 74th Grand Master of the SOSJ in
1933. Colonel Dr. William Sohier Bryant, MD became President of the
Sovereign Council. The SOSJ made alliances with various National
Socialist movements believing this to be the best solution to defeat
“Jewish Bolshevism.” Grand Master Prince Awaloff focused on
developing the military activities and intelligence work of the
Order probably as a consequence of his long military and
paramilitary career. The Order started a Grand Priory in Denmark in
1934 named the Sovereign Order of the Hospital of St. John of
Jerusalem in Denmark. It was founded by Prince Awaloff and was led
by Danish National Socialist, Episcopalian Archbishop Preben Wencke.
Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark was once Grand Chancellor of the
Grand Priory.

Grand Master Prince Awaloff became head of the
Russian Fascist Party in Germany, called the Russian National
Liberation Movement (ROND). Awaloff was named to this position by
the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Awaloff was apparently a double
agent, as he is known to have been associated with “Wild Bill”
William J. Donovan, founder of the Office of Strategic Services, and
American spy-masters W N Cromwell, OSJ and Allen Welsh Dulles
before, during and after WWII. Awaloff’s friend, Constantin
Sakharov, was again named the military leader of this organization
(ROND), which was the successor to Kirill’s secret army organization
in Germany. Prince Anastase Vonsiatsky and Howard Broenstrupp led
the fledgling Russian Nationalist field force in the United States,
which was headquartered in Hartford, Connecticut. Paul Winter, OSJ,
long time associate of Grand Chancellor Pichel and former KKK leader
from New York and Philadelphia, was involved with the American
Nationalists. In 1933, Pichel contacted Germany through Hitlers’s
friend Putzi Hanfstaengel in an effort to become the German
Chancellor’s personal representative in the United States. These
Russian and American Nationalists were now coordinating their
anti-Bolshevik publishing activity with Ulrich Fleischauer’s Welt
Dienst with offices in Erfurt, Germany.

German Lt. Ulrich Fleischauer was in charge of
this Welt Dienst publishing concern which inherited the campaign of
the American Anti-Bolshevist Publishing Association of Cherep
Spiridovich and Sidney Reilly. Translated as World Service, and
known before this time in France as Service Mondial, the SOSJ
publishing effort had actually been started in 1904 by Cherep
Spiridovich in Paris. At that time it was called Agence Latine. When
the Paris operation of Cherep Spiridovich was exposed by the
Bolshevists in 1919, he was able to convince Henry Ford to succeed
him by using the Dearborn Independent. The German agency Welt Dienst
had originated in Hamburg where it published a journal called the
White Cross in 1920. Baltic Germans of the SOSJ to include
Fleischauer and Markov II had originated the anti-Bolshevist journal
sharing information with Cherep Spiridovich. Eventually the Welt
Dienst operation came under the administration of Alfred Rosenberg
after the death of Czar Kirill I but operations continued in Erfurt.
The American Grand Priory also restarted this propaganda in the
United States in 1936, and it was called Edmondson Economic Service.
Pichel operated a similar “information service” for the SOSJ called
“Crux New Service” from Leonia, New Jersey from 1939 to 1945. Due to
pressure from the government and from the press both Edmondson and
Pichel moved the Order operations into the Pocono Mountains of
Pennsylvania after 1945. The efforts to expose a Jewish controlled
world conspiracy, considered by many as anti-Semitic, were continued
by the SOSJ into the 1950’s. Thereafter it became politically and
economically impossible due to the use of the court system by the
liberal establishment.

In 1936 Count Jerzy Potocki, OSJ, was the
Polish Ambassador to Washington, D. C. When the Second World War
started in 1939, he was instrumental in restarting White Cross
relief and intelligence gathering programs of the Polish American
and Canadian-Polish Ambulance Corps. The Commission for Polish
Relief, Inc. was run by Count Jerzy Potocki, OSJ and Chauncey
McCormick, OSJ of Chicago. In 1940, Mrs. Richard Teller Crane and
Chauncey McCormick represented the American White Cross and the
Committee for Polish Relief, which raised funds for the National
Polish Army of General Haller, OSJ. Nicholas M. Butler also had a
fund raiser for General Haller at Columbia University. Colonel
William J. Donovan was President of the Paderewski Fund for Polish
Relief, Inc. He led the intelligence service and coordinated with
Paderewski, Count Jerzy Potocki and U. S. Ambassador to Poland J.
Drexel Biddle.

Due to the impending advance of the Nazis into
Yugoslavia in 1941, the Order moved the relics and icon from
Belgrade to the Serbian Orthodox Monastery in Cetinje, Montenegro.
Prince Awaloff, Queen Marie of Yugoslavia, her aunt, Queen Elena of
Italy, King Carol of Romania and Grand Duchess Militza were all
involved in this decision. They feared the Nazis would take the
relics and icon because of their keen interest in historic objects
with legendary power. The Order lost possession of these items
because of the Communist takeover of the Balkans at the end of the
war. However, the famous icon and relics remain to the present time
in Cetinje, Montenegro. The icon is on display in the National
Museum, and the relics are in the Serbian Orthodox Monastery.

Prince
Grand Master

Lt.
Grand Master

President of the Sovereign
Council

Grand
Prior

Grand
Chancellor

Protector

1934

Prince GM Gen. Pavel Awaloff

Dr. W. S. Bryant, MD

Fr. J.P. Chodkiewicz

Col. C.L.T. Pichel

Czar Kirill I

1938

Prince GM Gen. Pavel Awaloff

Dr. W. S. Bryant, MD

Fr. J.P. Chodkiewicz

Col. C.L.T. Pichel

XVII. LIBERALS USE THE AMERICAN COURTS TO SILENCE
AMERICAN ANTI-COMMUNISTS

The alliance with fascist organizations cast doubts
on the honorable purposes of the Order. As a result of this,
exposure by the Dies Committee in 1939 and later the Great Sedition
Trials of the 1940’s, a second exodus from the Order occurred. While
the politically connected members of the Order including W. N.
Cromwell, the Dulles Brothers, Representative Hamilton Fish, III,
Senator Jack B. Tenney, Clarence “Buzzy” Hewes and Robert R.
McCormick were insulated due to their celebrity, other Knights were
easy targets for the liberal establishment.

In 1939 the Order of St. John of Jerusalem was
mentioned in Congressional hearings investigating pro-fascist
American movements. The Order leadership then made the decision to
conceal information and though Pichel edited the SOSJ publication,
Crux New Service, from Leonia, New Jersey between 1940 and 1945,
there is little evidence of the Order’s activities during the Second
World War. This continued until the headquarters was moved in 1945
to Pennsylvania. Continuing Grand Master Prince Awaloff’s lead, many
knights started “right-wing” organizations as a means of providing a
militant response to the rapid growth of international
Communism.

In the 1940’s, twenty-seven Americans were
charged by the U. S. Attorney General with conspiring to destroy the
morale of the American armed forces. A massive show trial, known as
the Great Sedition Trial, was conducted for the purpose of
connecting these individuals to a conspiracy thought to involve the
German Propaganda Ministry and anti-Communists in the United States.
The facts immediately were brought out in well publicized show
trials that many of these Americans were involved in efforts, being
orchestrated by the German World Service, to expose the
international conspiracy of the Bolsheviks, Zionists and Socialists.
The unintended backlash of the trial was that these defendants were
shown to be mostly Christian American patriots who were determined
to expose the Communists, Internationalists and atheists who were
radically changing society in the United States and in Allied
countries. Charges were dropped by the government, but not before
the defendants were ruined financially. This led to the “McCarthy
Era” and further “show trials” that were, this time, aimed at the
Left. California State Senator Jack B. Tenney, OSJ, Attorney General
of the Order from 1938 to 1944, headed a state commission to ferret
subversives, such as Communists, Zionists and Fascists, in
California, especially from the media industry. Of course most of
his efforts were directed against the Communists and Zionists.

“The CIA and FBI are tinker toys
compared to the ADL.” “We are beginning to understand
something of the magnitude of the ADL’s operations. We are
beginning to appreciate the vast spy network sprawling over
the nation and throughout the whole world. Our imagination is
staggered by its apparent control of the avenues of
communication.” “Their secret agents spy upon American
citizens. Extensive files and dossiers are compiled on those
with whom they disagree. Through their multitudinous controls
of the media of communication, they are capable of destroying
reputations and silencing all rebuttal.” (Congressional
Record, Dec. 6, 1971)

Red Fascism, a book by Senator Jack B.
Tenney, OSJ

Bryant became implicated in the Great Sedition
Trial when his name appeared on anti-government correspondence
involving William Dudley Pelley and Howard Victor Broenstrupp.
Trevor’s American Coalition of Patriotic, Civil and Fraternal
Societies was also named during the proceedings. Bryant, formerly
the personal physician of President Grover Cleveland and a Masonic
Knight Templar, found the negative publicity of the trial too
controversial, and he dropped out of the Order thereby leaving Grand
Chancellor Pichel to name Edmondson as President of the Sovereign
Council. As noted earlier, because of liberal governmental and media
pressure, Pichel, Edmondson and even Paul M. Winter moved to the
Pocono Mountain region of Pennsylvania after 1945. Robert E.
Edmondson, a noted anti-internationalist author, became President of
the Sovereign Council in 1944.

By 1944, the SOSJ was working closely with German
General Reinhard Gehlen’s “Abteilung Fremde Heere Ost Gehlens”
(Foreign Forces East). Robert Edmondson of Scranton, Pennsylvania
was President of the Sovereign Council from 1944 to 1948, but the
control of the Order was firmly in the hands of Grand Chancellor
Pichel. The Convent was moved to Shickshinny, Pennsylvania in 1945.
This was an area in which Eastern Europeans had been relocating for
years. In 1946, the Polish White Cross of Baltimore bought an
ambulance for Warsaw and donated it though the offices of Nicholas
Murray Butler.

Prince
Grand Master

Lt.
Grand Master

President of the Sovereign
Council

Grand
Prior

Grand
Chancellor

Protector

1944

Prince GM Gen. Pavel Awaloff

Robert Edmondson

Col. C.L.T. Pichel

XVIII. THE ORDER ENTRENCHES ITSELF FOR THE COLD
WAR

The SOSJ had lost the majority of its Russian and
European membership during the last phases of WWI when the Russian
Guard Divisions were thrown into battle in tragic fashion. British
and French General Staffs directed all battlefield strategy, and
therefore, many suspected that the slaughter of the elite of their
allied Russian forces was part of the globalist’s agenda. This
carnage was followed in 1919 by further military betrayal which
permanently defeated the SOSJ Knights and the forces of Prince
Awaloff in the Baltic. The English and French navies bombarded his
anti-Communist army resulting in decisive defeat outside of Riga,
Latvia. Much later, the intervention of British and Americans on the
side of the Soviet Union during WWII culminated in the great victory
for international Communism that was the Second World War. The
Allies rounded up and incarcerated free White Russians for
deportation to Stalin’s death camps in Operation Keelhaul, a result
of an agreement made between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at the
Yalta Conference. Forced repatriation by the Allies resulted in the
deaths of thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands, of White
Russians by firing squads or deportation to the Gulag archipelago
labor camps. This consistent action during the 20th century in favor
of the Communists with the obvious goal of creating high mortality
among anti-communists was conclusive proof to the SOSJ that the
western governments were controlled by Internationalists and
Communists. Because of this, the SOSJ continued to attract patriotic
and nationalistic western military men to its membership, and to
operate as an anti-Communist intelligence agency. Admiral Barry
Domville, former head of British Naval Intelligence, was a long
serving member of the SOSJ. It appeared that General Douglas
MacArthur’s entire senior staff was in the Order. The Order became
involved in Operation Paperclip and the famous “Rat Lines” which
spirited Nazi anti-Communists out of Europe.

XIX. THE MILITARY INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY AND
KNIGHTS OF THE SOSJ DEFEND AGAINST COMMUNISM

The Order was engaged worldwide in anti-Communist
activities. Former SS Major General Boris Holmston-Smyslovsky, alias
Colonel von Reganau, and U.S. Marine Lieutenant General Pedro Del
Valle spurred renewed SOSJ activity in opposition to the Communists
in Europe after 1948. Holmston-Smyslovsky was an old associate of
Prince Awaloff. These men were involved with the Gladio program
which prompted the founding of the U.S. Army Special Forces. The
secret army of Czar Kirill I formed a nucleus for Gladio “stay
behind” operations which were designed to wage perpetual war on the
Communists. As successor to SOSJ Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations
operations, Allen W. Dulles, Colonel William J. Donovan, Gen.
Reinhard Gehlen and Lt. General Pedro Del Valle initiated NATO’s
Operation Gladio during the era of the founding of the U. S. Central
Intelligence Agency and German BND. The U. S. Counter-Intelligence
Corps, the Gehlen Organization and the Knights of Malta started the
Volunteer Freedom Corps otherwise known as Operation Gladio. Ten
thousand men were descendants of the secret army of Czar Kirill I
and the fifty garrisons of East European Freikorps mentioned by
Cherep Spiridovich in the 1920’s and by Phillip Corso, OSJ in the
1950’s. Even in the United States, some knights started
anti-Communist domestic militias and supported conservative
publications to increase public awareness of the agenda of
International Socialism.

Prince
Grand Master

Lt.
Grand Master

President of the Sovereign
Council

Grand
Prior

Grand
Chancellor

Protector

1948

Prince GM Gen. Pavel Awaloff

C. Christensen Grand Prior of
Denmark

Col. C.L.T. Pichel

XX. THE POST-WAR GERMAN ORDER OF ST. JOHN ABANDONS
THE SOSJTO IMPROVE ITS IMAGE

A succession of German Lieutenant Grand Masters
during the 1950’s is evidence of the continued close ties Grand
Master Prince Awaloff had to the German Order of St. John. Scipio
Baron von Engelhardt-Schnellenstein from the Palatinate contacted
Grand Chancellor Pichel during the period 1949 to 1951 with the
offer to help reinvigorate the SOSJ. He was an old associate of
Prince Awaloff from the Baltic Brotherhood and a veteran of the Welt
Dienst and Fichte Bund propaganda services. He served as Lt. Grand
Master from 1954 to 1955. Grand Master Prince Awaloff was brought to
the United States from Austria by Operation Paperclip in 1952. His
stepson, a former German SS officer with the Russian Volunteer Army
of Major General Holmston-Smyslovsky, had been captured by the
Communists while working behind the lines for the U.S.
Counter-Intelligence Corps in 1949. Grand Master Prince Awaloff died
September 30, 1954 in the United States and is reportedly buried at
Arlington National Cemetery. Many of the remaining members of
Awaloff’s Grand Priory of Columbia were taken onto the roles of the
American Grand Priory in 1955. The Grand Priory of Columbia
consisted of most of those Knights of European descent on the roles
of the Russian National Society at 5 Columbia Circle in New York
City under the leadership of Brasol and Sakharov. Their contribution
to the defense of the West and to war relief led members of the SOSJ
to believe that they would be recognized as equal partners among the
national orders of Malta. Therefore, the election of a new Grand
Master to replace Prince Awaloff was postponed.

Frederick H. Count von Zeppelin served from
1956 to 1960 as Lt. Grand Master. Franklin Allen West of Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania became President of the Sovereign Council in 1956.
Pichel wrote an inaccurate history of the SOSJ in 1958 designed to
conceal the fascist ties of the SOSJ but complementary to the SMOM,
and the English and German orders of St. John. The hope of
acceptance of the SOSJ by these orders would again prove to be
futile. The Prussian Prince Wilhelm Karl, the head of the German
Order of St. John, visited Grand Chancellor Pichel in Pennsylvania
in 1961 after the death of Grand Duke Cyril’s eldest daughter. She
was the wife of the Hohenzollern Pretender to the throne of Germany,
the Prussian Prince Louis Ferdinand. Prince Louis Ferdinand had been
a life-long intimate, and employee, of Henry Ford and the Ford
family. Wilhelm Karl ended Johanniter Orden association with the
SOSJ when he learned that there were no charitable activities
undertaken by the SOSJ and that most members appeared to be
connected to military and government Intelligence. Scipio Baron von
Engelhardt-Schnellenstein and F. H. Count von Zeppelin were forced
to resign from the SOSJ at the risk of their membership in the
German Order.

Princess Ileana of Romania, Queen Maries’
daughter, had obtained land in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania which was
near Franklin West in Pittsburgh. There, similar to her aunt Grand
Duchess Elizabeth, she started the first community for Orthodox
religious sisters in the United States and became the Mother
Superior.

Prince
Grand Master

Lt.
Grand Master

President of the Sovereign
Council

Grand
Prior

Grand
Chancellor

Protector

1954

LGM Baron von
Engelhardt-Schnellenstein

Col. C.L.T. Pichel

1956

LGM Graf von Zeppelin

F. A. West

Col. C.L.T. Pichel

A Frenchman, Paul Granier de Cassagnac, was
recruited for the Lieutenancy in 1960. Embarrassed when the National
Socialist ties to the Order became known by the newer members in
1962, and believing that the presence of King Peter II of Yugoslavia
as a new member would improve the Order’s social standing, Cassagnac
called for the members to elect him Grand Master. Crolian Edelen was
present at the vote count and verified that Cassagnac failed in his
attempt to gain the Order’s highest office. Nonetheless, ignoring
the failed election, Cassagnac created a splinter order.

King Peter II was the son of King Alexander I
of Yugoslavia and had joined the SOSJ in 1961. He followed Cassagnac
into schism but soon disagreed with him and started his own Order of
St. John under his Yugoslavian royal title. Prince Serge Troubetzkoy
had also left the original Order and became King Peter’s Lieutenant
Grand Master. When the King claimed that their new order was not the
original trunk of the old order, Troubetzkoy took his Russian
dominated organization and operated independently. The Order retains
letters from Prince Troubetzkoy in which he discusses the nature of
these different orders. In the meantime, Pichel and his Supreme
Council asked Admiral Felix Count von Luckner, a famed German naval
officer and associate of Prince Awaloff, to assume the position of
Lieutenant Grand Master that had been vacated by Cassagnac. LGM
Admiral Count von Luckner became terminally ill and resigned in
1966. He died in 1967. Pichel nominated Crolian Edelen who was
elected the 75th Grand Master in 1966.

Edelen was a German-American and former Pacific
WWII Army intelligence officer and was an avid amateur genealogist.
He attempted to unravel the 20th century history of the SOSJ, but
succeeded only in creating more controversy about its origins which
he was unable to trace before 1933. Unfortunately, though necessary
at the time, the attempt to conceal former alliances to fascist
governments prior to and during WWII created chronic problems for
the American Grand Priory. The Order was protecting its members and
their families. The reluctance to offer proof of lineage through
Czar Kirill I fueled the critics of the SOSJ.

An example of the Order's geo-political
activities in 1964.

The SOSJ membership roles during this time
included Generals Lemuel Shepherd, Pedro Del Valle, George
Stratemeyer, Charles Willoughby, Ralph Smith, Terry Morrison, Bonner
Fellers, Admirals Charles Cooke, RL Porter, Herbert Howard, Richard
Black, Francis Spellman and Prince Michel Sturdza of Romania,
Congressman Larry MacDonald and Senator John Ashcroft. Well known
leaders of the American intelligence community accepted various
positions in the SOSJ.

Prince
Grand Master

Lt.
Grand Master

President of the Sovereign
Council

Grand
Prior

Grand
Chancellor

Protector

1960

LGM P Casssagnac

F. A. West

Col. C.L.T. Pichel

1962

LGM Count von Luckner

Bishop B. Kurz

Col. C.L.T. Pichel

1966

Prince GM Crolian Edelen

Bishop B. Kurz

Col. C.L.T. Pichel

XXI. THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA STAND AGAINST HUMANISTS
WITHIN THE CHURCH

After the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council
in 1969, the Order became one of the few institutions to preserve
the ancient Latin Rite liturgy. Catholic traditionalists were
attracted to the Order by its ecclesiastical independence guaranteed
in perpetuity by numerous popes. The humanist revolution had entered
the Catholic Church and the Order struggled to resume its former
role as a staunch defender of the Catholic Faith.

Unfortunately Grand Chancellor Pichel became
increasingly eccentric in his later years. He alienated the members
but retained legal control of the SOSJ by his use of proxy votes.
Grand Master Edelen resigned in 1976. The 76th Grand Master elected
was Prince Roberto Paterno from Sicily, Hereditary Grand Prior of
the ancient Langue of Aragon. Elected in 1976, he served until 1983.
Grand Chancellor Pichel, who was 87 years old, was coerced into
resigning in 1977 and his duties were divided between Grand Prior
Capell of America and Grand Prior Wicklund of Europe. Pichel soon
was able to become active again and to work with Grand Prior Capell
but both of them were dead by 1982.

Bishop Blaise Kurz and Fr. Gommar De Pauw,
both were members of the Order for a period of time. They
defended the existence of the Latin Mass from the Modernists
and Globalists who operate from inside of the Church and work
towards a new, one world religion.

Fr. James Wathen, OSJ, Chief Chaplain of
the Order for many years. He also defended the sanctity of the
Latin Mass against the Globalists who are removing Christ's
presence from the world.

American Grand Prior Capell unexpectedly died in
October, 1980 and when Pichel died in May, 1982 several knights took
control of a weakened SOSJ corporation that he had founded in 1956.
The loss from old age of many influential members of the SOSJ gave
impetus for a few knights to attempt to seize control of the Order
to make legal claim on the legendary lost Romanoff treasure that
reportedly lay on the floor of the Sea of Japan. The leader of this
movement had been expelled from the Order in 1981, prior to the
death of Pichel. Regardless, they filed a claim against the
Sovereign Council for patent infringement. SOSJ Security General
Nicholas Nazarenko was a former Cossack German Waffen SS
Intelligence Officer who had been recruited after the war to work in
Romania for the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps. Nazarenko denied
the attempt to take control of the Order to the knights who were
shown to be ineligible on several counts and his timely intervention
helped the Sovereign Council to form the Association of Family
Commanders and Hereditary Knights in 1983. A federal court case
filed by the splinter group in an effort to seize control of the
Order finally succeeded only in the legal grant to them of a
trademarked name from Pichel’s 1956 corporation. Dr. John Grady, MD
defended the SOSJ against the coup attempt and was elected in a
Chapter General in 1991 as the 77th Grand Master of the SOSJ. Dr.
Grady, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot, medical doctor, politician
and an early founder of the Right To Life movement, helped to write
a new constitution which was accepted by the Order at the first
Chapter General since the Fall of Malta. Grand Master Dr. Grady then
proceeded to rebuild the Order. The 78th Prince Grand Master of the
SOSJ, Barry Garland, was elected in 2006 and assumed office in 2008
upon the retirement of Dr. Grady. Grand Master Garland, a
professional bodyguard and critical care nurse, assumed leadership
of the Order at a time when the Catholic Church has been weakened by
unrelenting campaigns of the social humanists and of those who
oppose Jesus Christ.

Prince
Grand Master

Lt.
Grand Master

President of the Sovereign
Council

Grand
Prior

Grand
Chancellor

Protector

1976

Prince GM Sir Roberto Paterno Col C LT
Pichel

America: F. Capell

Europe: T. Wicklund

Col. C.L.T. Pichel

1983

LGM Prince S. Troubetzkoy

Gen. B. von Stahl

Fr. James Wathen Chief Chaplain

Dr. Sir John Grady, MD

1991

Prince GM Dr. Sir John Grady, MD

LGM Prince S. Troubetzkoy

2003

Prince GM Dr. Sir John Grady, MD

LGM Barry Garland

2008

Prince GM Sir Barry Garland

GM Emeritus Dr. Sir John Grady

Rev. Raymond V.
Dunn

Brian J. Garland

XXII. THE HISTORIC MISSION OF THE SOSJ

Since its inception ca. 1050, the SOSJ embraced
the nursing and military aspects of its Mission with such excellence
and zeal that even its principle adversary, the adherents of
militant Islam, were known to respect the selflessness,
professionalism and skill of the warrior monks. But the diabolic
obsessions of the social humanists that were ushered in with the
so-called Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century have created an
adversary more powerful than Islam. The adversary is elusive and
polymorphic and has often been able to wreak its havoc from within
the walls of the Church and of the ancient and noble Order of the
Knights of Malta.

Napoleon Bonaparte captured the Pope and
his sovereign territory, which composed much of present-day northern
Italy, during the era of upheaval started by the French Revolution.
The SOSJ thereby suffered the loss of the support of the Holy See at
a time when that august body was controlled by revolutionists and
Freemasons. The Church itself became compromised by revolutionary
philosophies which affect it even to the present day. In 1798 the
SOSJ therefore found itself forced to compromise its strict Roman
Catholic ideals and traditions. Rather than betray the Religion, it
sought protection from, and gave its renewed efforts to, the
Orthodox Russian czar who was the strongest proponent of the Counter
Revolution. The Orthodox Church, by the grace of God, willingly gave
its support to the ancient Catholic Order.

It is true that
men with decidedly non-Catholic beliefs have been accepted in the
past as knights because it was thought that their prominence in
society would benefit the Order. The leadership repeatedly erred
when it failed to remember that good works alone are not all that is
necessary for salvation. In similar fashion to the splintering that
has been endured by the Catholic Church these errors have led to the
creation of multiple splinter organizations claiming the SOSJ
lineage. Beside the genealogical lineage that has here been detailed
and documented one can identify the Order of St. John of Jerusalem
by its indelible marks that are jealously guarded and preserved by
the Knights of Justice. Just as one can look to the identifying
marks of the Catholic Church which point unerringly to the True
Church of Jesus Christ, we can also look for the marks of the Order
of St. John that have identified it throughout its thousand year
history. The Church is identified by being one, holy, Catholic and
Apostolic. The marks of the Order of St. John, which are unique and
distinguishing characteristics, are its identifiers as recognized
before the loss of Malta in 1798. The ancient Catholic Order is a
sovereign republic governed by noble Hospitaller Knights.

As
described in this abbreviated history of our militant Catholic
brotherhood since the loss of Malta, the SOSJ has continuously
striven under difficult circumstances to fulfill its historic
mission as defender of Christendom and as servant to the poor and
infirm. Two hundred years of counter revolutionary service for
Christendom have challenged the Knights of Malta of the Sovereign
Order of St. John of Jerusalem with engagement in both physical and
spiritual combat. During the last five decades, the Order has been
among those few institutions which have decried the deterioration
caused by social humanist intrusion into the highest circles of the
Catholic Church. The leadership of the SOSJ, recognizing the dangers
of the Trojan Horse amongst the walls of the Order and of the
Church, has instituted the appropriate counter measures.

The
Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem is an independent Catholic
order in communion with the Catholic Church. It stands on ancient
rights and privileges of sovereignty and independence granted in
perpetuity by popes and governments of the Middle Ages. The Knights
of Justice are the protectors of the Order’s sovereignty and
traditions as handed down from antiquity in unbroken fashion through
Czar Kirill I and the Sovereign Council. The Russian Langue of the
Order is in communion with the Catholic Church through the personal
jurisdiction of the Grand Prior of the Malankara Catholic Langue, a
Bishop whose church has a special vocation to unite Catholicism and
Orthodox Christianity. Though the Knights of St. John may not be
able to be at the sepulcher of Our Lord in Jerusalem, by the grace
of God we will continue to assist in the preservation of His eternal
gifts to us. The ancient Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem
continues as a hospitaller service organization structured as an
army of the Catholic Church. The Headquarters of the Order is in
Jupiter, Florida, U.S.A. The Convent of the Order is located in
Benton, Tennessee, U.S.A.

SOSJ TIMELINE FROM 1797

1798: The SOSJ moves its convent from Malta to the
home of its protector, Czar Paul I, in St. Petersburg, Russia, and
elects him the 72nd Grand Master. The Russian czars become the
perpetual protectors of the SOSJ.

1803: John Baptist di Tommasi is named the 72nd
Prince Grand Master of the SOSJ. He was chosen by the Pope from a
list of candidates presented from the dispersed priories of the
Order. He was the candidate of the SOSJ in St. Petersburg.

1805: Upon the death of Grand Master di Tommasi,
the SOSJ in Russia, in order to remain independent of the intrigues
of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, continues under the President of the
Sovereign Council and the Czar Alexander I, Protector of the
Order.

1893: Russian Knights of Malta introduce American
civic leaders to the White Cross at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

1904: The American White Cross First Aid Society is
founded in Chicago, Illinois by civic leaders in association with
the U.S. Military, the Catholic Church and a member of the English
St. John’s Ambulance Association.

1899: The U.S. Army, civic leaders and the Catholic
Church attempt to gain a U.S. Title 36 Charter for the American
White Cross from the Congress of the United States of America.

1908: The White Cross Hospital and Relief
Association is founded in New York City, New York. It was the
combined effort of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Knights of Malta
joining with a Protestant relief organization.

1912: The American Grand Priory of the Sovereign
Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta, including the
Catholic Grand Priory of Russia is given a Constitution and a Grand
Prior. Its founding is dated to 1908.

1913: Grand Duke Alexander Michaelovich is elected
the 73rd Grand Master of the SOSJ.

1917: The SOSJ is forced from Russia by the
Bolshevik Revolution. The Polish White Cross is founded by the Grand
Priory of Russia in the United States a few days later.

1919: The Russian Grand Priory of the Sovereign
Order of St. John of Jerusalem is re-established in Saltzvedel,
Germany by Knights of the Corps des Pages, Colonel Pavel Awaloff and
Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich.

1922: The OSJ Sovereign Council is reconstituted in
New York City by the authority of Grand Duke Cyril, Guardian of the
Imperial Throne of Russia. William Nelson Cromwell assumes
operational control of the SOSJ as President of the Sovereign
Council.

1932: Grand Duchess Xenia authorizes the transfer
of the SOSJ relics from Berlin to Belgrade to the custody of King
Alexander I of Yugoslavia, Protector of the SOSJ.

1933: Grand Master Grand Duke Alexander
Michaelovich dies in France. General Prince Awaloff is made
President of the Russian National Liberation Movement in Germany.

1934: King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, Protector of
the SOSJ, is assassinated in France. Czar Kirill I becomes Protector
of the SOSJ. Prince Awaloff is elected the 74th Grand Master of the
SOSJ. The Sovereign Council and Prince Awaloff found the Sovereign
Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem in Denmark. Colonel
Charles L.T. Pichel becomes Grand Chancellor of the SOSJ upon the
death of J.G.B. Bulloch. Dr. Bryant becomes President of the
Sovereign Council.

1944: Robert Edmondson of Scranton, Pennsylvania
becomes President of the Sovereign Council upon the retirement of
Dr. Bryant.

1945: Grand Chancellor Colonel Charles L.T. Pichel
moves the SOSJ Convent from New York City to Shickshinny,
Pennsylvania.

1946: The SOSJ Grand Priory in Denmark is
reconstituted after the war by the Sovereign Council.

2009: The Malankara Catholic Langue is created and
the Russian Langue is re-established. The Russian Langue is in
communion with the Catholic Church through the personal jurisdiction
of Bishop Joseph Mar Thomas whose church has a special vocation to
unite Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity.

SOSJ LEADERSHIP SINCE 1797

Prince Grand Master Lt Grand Master President of the Grand Prior
ProtectorSovereign Council